Dara Engler, Prize Judge
Selecting award winners for the State of the Art Gallery’s December 2024 Juried Show was not an easy task. The jurors selected excellent work, making my job quite difficult. Looking at artwork I admire has always felt like developing a little visual crush, and I left judging having fallen in love with a lot of pieces. I hope all the artists are proud of what they accomplished.
It was an honor and pleasure to judge the State of the Art Gallery’s 2024 Annual December Juried Show. I appreciate the work and heart that went into each piece in the show. Congratulations to all the included artists!
First Prize $500
This mixed media piece layers natural forms in a way that feels simultaneously like a flat pattern and a deep space. Together they create a sense of history and time, appropriate for the subject. I enjoy the breaking of the picture plane edge, the balance of the value structure, and the use of both dark and light line in the piece. The texture reminds me of Van Gogh’s ink landscape drawings and the composition makes me recall John T. Scott’s print series, Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape. The tightly stacked vertical format sets the mood for the concept in a way the traditional horizontal landscape could not.
Second-place went to Emma Lunica’s Gay Jesus’ Birthday. The painting immerses the viewer in warm light, with beautifully saturated color that shifts from warm to cool as it falls into shadow. It successfully depicts the sense of sharing a celebration with friends and family, relaxed in natural gestures. The streamers and foreground objects on the table use Vermeer’s compositional device, making the viewer feel included in the gathering as we look over and around those obstacles, into the space.
Third Prize $150
Repair • Mixed media • 11″× 14″
Third-place, Justin Moshaty’s Repair, balances pattern, shape, abstraction, and representation in a way that feels like the space of memory. The composition layers both lightness and weight. It defies gravity and references it. The piece reads like an homage to something I can’t name and allows the viewer space for personal interpretation.
Honorable Mention $50
Moonshadow • Oil on cradled panel • 16″× 20″
Julie Waltz-Stalker’s Moon Shadow exudes luminosity, even in its cool monochrome. Like the work of John Singer Sargent, the figure has a wonderful sense of gesture and an economy of mark that creates stunning focal points that on closer investigation, are made of a few simple marks.
Honorable Mention $50
John Owlver • Dryer lint • 11″× 17″
Heidi Hooper’s John Owlver is an example of why the fiber arts are having a contemporary resurgence. The varied textures, saturated colors, and comedic content provide humor and beauty– something of great value in our present day.
