Director's Choice Award
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| Metamorphosis Ignatius Widiapradja |
The Director's Choice Award is offered to the artist whose work, in the opinion of the gallery director, offers the highest technical and artistic merit of the work selected by the juror. For this exhibition, the Director's Choice is awarded to Ignatius Widiapradja for his work entitled Metamorphosis.
Juror's Statement
Photographs today play an important role in our society and when I have the chance to select some of them to assemble an exhibition, I feel privileged to be able to make a small contribution to an ongoing worldwide desire for meaningful and memorable images.
This anthology of forty photographs has been chosen to educate and inform, to record and preserve moments in time, to illustrate different people, lifestyles, cultures and places, to provoke emotional feelings and perhaps change things and, most of all, to show the value of self-expression. Many of these photographs can be defined as "conceptual", that is, not merely descriptive, but proposing a way of thinking about certain issues and containing built-in theories. They are just a hint that conveys messages of political and social values, like in the photographs of Ashmore or Raddatz.
The first prize, Facebook, by Sivack, is an innocent trompe l'oeil. A man's face (the actual book cover) peeps out of the bookshelf, the price stuck on his forehead. I wonder if perhaps in the grand bazaar which is Facebook ®, where people weave social and personal relations, communication has a price and we are all on the market. Others, like Jones’ photograph, describe found-again spaces and, through a game of reflection, the superimposition of different temporal levels, the co-existence of anachronistic elements in a place in which its past function collides with its current one.
Stewart, in his series of small cathode ray tubes, retakes and reinterprets the paradigms of Pop Art and Minimalism, the seriality, the repetition, the use and method of industrial production. Etherton, on the other hand, transforms a rose into a speck of color and uses it as the sole element that occupies and defines her field of action. Speck shows how a certain personal identity can allure the viewer while challenging him intellectually and demolishing the mental structure that accompanies the image of femininity.
These photographs, in the end, are a choice sampling that acutely represents the point-and-shoot style and informal aesthetic of contemporary Photography – off-hand, irreverent, raw and immediate – that has become the gold standard for the past couple of decades and continues to resonate among younger photographers working today.
- Amalia Pizzardi
