2010 SECA Art Award: Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, Kamau Amu Patton
Through April 3, 2012
151 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA
Every two years SFMOMA honors contemporary Bay Area artists of exceptional talent and great promise with the SECA Art Award. This exhibition, with accompanying catalogue, is the culmination of an extensive selection process conducted in 2010 by curators and members of SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), an SFMOMA art interest group celebrating its 50th anniversary this winter.
From a truly outstanding group of finalists considered for the award, SFMOMA assistant curators Apsara DiQuinzio and Tanya Zimbardo selected the four current winners—Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, and Kamau Amu Patton—who have each developed singular approaches to the related aesthetic concerns of visual perception, abstraction, the handmade, reuse, and materiality.
Ancalmo’s film-based installations and kinetic sculptures combine various found machines to explore themes such as chance, obsolescence, and adaptation. Marrying content and form, his works build structural dialogues that speak to the complexities involved in human relationships.
Found materials are also incorporated in Jacobsen’s meticulous drawings, watercolors, and installations, which express his interest in recollection, doppelgangers, and reflection. Several of his works consist of side-by-side drawings that are made by looking at a photo and then re-creating it entirely from memory, sometimes repeatedly.
Using a floor loom, Laskey employs weaving to expand the painterly tradition of geometric abstraction. Her desire to be involved with every element of the structure of her paintings led her to develop a rigorous process of weaving distinct shapes directly into what would typically be understood as the canvas, complicating the traditional relationship between figure and ground.
Patton investigates perceptual experience, the connection between sound and vision, and novel forms of experimentation, synthesizing a range of media to create atmospheric environments and objects that explore the material and conceptual processes of art making. Read more
2010 SECA Art Award: Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, Kamau Amu Patton is funded by SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), an SFMOMA art interest group, and the Graue Family Foundation.
