SFMOMA announces 2010 SECA Art Award winners Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, Kamau Amu Patton
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is pleased to announce that Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, and Kamau Amu Patton are the 2010 artists selected for its biennial SECA Art Award. Administered by SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), one of the museum’s auxiliaries, the signature award honors Bay Area artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantial recognition. The four award winners will receive a modest cash prize and will be featured in an exhibition (with accompanying catalogue) that will open in the fall of 2011.This year, SFMOMA considered more than 250 artists working in a broad range of media who were nominated by Bay Area art professionals, including curators, professors, gallery owners, critics, SECA members, and former recipients of the SECA Art Award. Thirty finalists received studio visits, and the four winners were selected by Apsara DiQuinzio, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA and Tanya Zimbardo, assistant curator of media arts at SFMOMA.
Mauricio Ancalmo
In his process-based film installations, Mauricio Ancalmo often incorporates found machines of various kinds—16mm film projectors, a sewing machine, a word processor, turntables, old medical equipment—and pushes these mechanical instruments to their material limit, so that chance, physical breakdown, and erosion become incorporated into his working method without being the end in and of itself. A hybrid of film, sound, and sculpture, Ancalmo’s generative installations (in some instances cameraless), construct new encounters with salvaged analogue apparatuses that inscribe film leader through novel means.
Colter Jacobsen
Jacobsen’s ongoing series of memory drawings study the process of recollection and reversal. Beginning with an intricately rendered copy of a found photograph, the artist presents it side-by-side with its imperfect, mirrored double drawn entirely from memory. While Jacobsen’s meticulous draftsmanship is evident in his still remarkably faithful reproduction of the original, he emphasizes the subtle shifts, distortions, and softened details.
Ruth Laskey
Laskey makes her small linen textiles with a traditional floor loom. She determines the twill pattern for each work ahead of time, making precise mathematical calculations and executing preparatory drawings on graph paper. Often utilizing a restricted palette and simple geometric forms—diamonds, triangles, squares, polygons—to integrate a figure/ground dialogue into her process, she sets these shapes against and within white ground. The vibrant delineations she creates are both the subject of each composition and part of its underlying structure.
Kamau Amu Patton
Synthesizing different elements within his multidimensional installations to a dynamic combined effect, Kamau Amu Patton’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the conditions leading to a perceptual experience of a given site. He brings into dialogue diverse media—steel sculpture, drawings, paintings, video, sound, and performance—collapsing the tangible and the ephemeral. Patton’s recent projects have explored the abstract qualities of light and sound in relation to performer-audience interaction, movement, and digital processing.
50th Anniversary of SECA
The 2010 SECA Art Award exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of SECA. Distinguished as one of the few and longest standing award programs dedicated to local artists at a modern art museum in the United States, SECA has recognized more than 60 winning artists over the past 50 years, and given hundreds of finalists a platform to speak about their practice. To mark the anniversary in fall of 2011, SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Alison Gass will organize an exhibition of selected work by past SECA Art Award winners and edit a comprehensive book that, like the exhibition, weaves together artists’ voices and recollections to reveal the full story of SECA’s layered development, as well as the larger history of its importance to Bay Area art practice.
Recent SECA Award recipients include Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, Trevor Paglen (2008); Sarah Cain, Kota Ezawa, Amy Franceschini, Mitzi Pederson, Leslie Shows (2006); Rosana Castrillo Díaz, Simon Evans, Shaun O’Dell, and Josephine Taylor (2004); John Bankston, Andrea Higgins, Chris Johanson, and Will Rogan (2002); Rachael Neubauer and Kathryn Van Dyke (2000); Chris Finley, Gay Outlaw, Laurie Reid, and Rigo 98 (1998); and D-L Alvarez, Anne Appleby, and Barry McGee (1996).
2010 SECA Art Award is funded by SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), an SFMOMA art interest group. Additional support is provided by the Robert Huston Memorial Fund.
The 50th Anniversary SECA Exhibition is organized by SFMOMA and funded by in part by The Graue Family Foundation.
