Four Finalists have been named for the prestigious Hudgens Prize. All four artists will display their work in the Finalist’s Exhibition, scheduled for June 8 – September 7.

The Finalists are:
Christopher Chambers, Robbie Land, Derek Larson & Pam Longobardi

The $50,000 Hudgens Prize will be awarded by the jury panel based on in-person visits to the four Finalist’s studios and the works on view in the Hudgens Prize Finalist’s Exhibition. The prize winner will be announced at the Hudgens Prize Award Celebration, which will take place on Saturday, August 10. The Finalists will also offer Artists Talks at the Hudgens during the exhibition, to be scheduled soon.

The four Finalists were chosen from a pool of 370 applicants by a jury of curators from three top art institutions in the nation. The three jurors represent a broad perspective, and are all Contemporary Curators at their various institutions. The jury panel includes Doryun Chong, Associate Curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Toby Kamps, Chief Curator of the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and Heather Pesanti, Senior Curator at AMOA/Arthouse in Austin, TX (until recently Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY).

Angela Nichols, Director of Programming & Exhibits at the Hudgens, stated: “This has been an exciting process, and after working tirelessly for many months to bring the competition to this point, it is nice to finally be able to announce the Finalists. The Hudgens Prize competition is one of the biggest and most exciting things that we do as an organization, and we’re so fortunate that we are able to offer this opportunity to Georgia artists.

“It has been really fun to be a ‘fly on the wall,’ observing the decision-making process of the jury panel. There were so many amazing artists that submitted works, and I certainly didn’t envy the jurors in the task that we gave them in choosing just four to be Finalists. Each of the Finalists is an accomplished, intelligent and thoughtful artist, and I’m looking forward to working with them to curate the Finalists Exhibition,” Nichols concluded.

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CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERS
 
Read the great article about Christopher on ArtsAtl.com, one of a series on our Finalists!
 

Chambers, an Atlanta resident, works to understand and emphasize the means and ends by which our culture and identity is fabricated and propagated. His work deciphers and augments the narratives of our culture and our personal identities, mostly through its trash.

His work has been exhibited primarily in improvised public environments, as large-scale video and multimedia installations: in an alley, a failed restaurant, a soon-to-fail coffee shop, and a perpetually empty storefront. In other settings and mediums he has exhibited with the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Southwest Arts Center, the Living Walls Conference Atlanta, apexart NY, and the High Museum of Atlanta.

He has received project grants from Le Flash Atlanta, Brooks & Company Dance Theater, The Center for Puppetry Arts and Elevate Atlanta. He has most recently collaborated on two successive installation and interdisciplinary exhibitions at Beep Beep and Kibbee Galleries.

Mr. Chambers was raised in a variety of suburban sprawls throughout the midwest, northeast, and southeast and received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Artist’s Statement: “The biological function of memory has provided an inadvertent structure from which the entire history of human culture has been able to build itself upon, and is the function which my interdisciplinary work dedicates itself towards examining and clarifying its scale, complexity, and personal and communal impact.

By accumulating and deconstructing the artifacts of memory I re-evaluate the visual records of both personal memory as well as the communal memory that these artifacts have facilitated.

The physical artifacts of memory I draw from are the large cache of disposable experiences shared within a community, as well as the machines and environments used to produce and distribute these experiences. This cache is composed, in part, of the large media structures of television, radio, telephone, internet, advertisement, interior design, magazine, yearbook, billboard, each of which contains a more specific and varied linear and non-linear narrative content.

Each element (a magazine advertisement, a VHS recorded-television commercial, a yearbook photograph) is reduced to a smaller piece, which is utilized as a note or sampled melody and recombined with other sampled pieces. The resulting reconstituted impressions reconstruct these shared experiences into a Gestalt, of a meditative, melodic arrangement, like a symphonic composition.

Through this process of accumulation, deconstruction and re-compression of found mediated interactions, images of emotional, social and informational exchanges are discovered and fabricated through their simultaneous existence (all of our known surviving physical history existing at once in the present). Through this work, I communicate human emotion and experience as I have come to understand them through these mediated memories; I do this to expose and emphasize the linear and nonlinear narratives of our cultural and personal identities and the means by which our culture and identity is fabricated and propagated.”

www.chrisofchambers.com

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ROBBIE LAND
 
Read the great article about Robbie on ArtsAtl.com, one of a series on our Finalists!
 

Land, also an Atlanta resident, was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He began working in film, specifically super-8mm, producing animations and live action experiments. He has worked on a variety of projects from cinematographer at the Florida Lightning Research Facility to teaching college level photography and film production.
 
He continues to experiment with various photo-based and sound methods for exhibition of installations, film screenings, performance and photography. His work has been exhibited at Kunst Film Biennale in Cologne, Germany, Museum Do Chiado in Lisbon, Portugal, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition in Denver, Colorado, Scientifical Center Espace Mendès in Poitiers, France, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta and a variety of solo and group screenings and venues.
 
Artist’s Statement: “As a media artist my work has focused on an array of subjects with various conventional and unconventional approaches. Currently I am developing photo-based work that provides a personal documentation of the earth’s natural phenomena.

I utilize a variety of methods such as employing microscope objectives, time exposure, hydrophones, and pinhole cinematography to provide a personal perspective, a poetic science to my subjects. This includes bioluminescent organisms found in the southeast, tracking and recording the sun over a twelve-month period as it passes through the seasons and a 16mm film created using the photosynthesis process.

My film work combines a photographic representation of a specific subject or place with traces of its physicality and it’s ambiance. It is my desire that the viewers see and hear the place and obtain a sense of its textural existence as it is exhibited in screenings, installations and performance.”

http://robbieland.net

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DEREK LARSON
 
Read the great article about Derek on ArtsAtl.com, one of a series on our Finalists!
 

Larson, a Statesboro resident, is a new media artist. He received his MFA from the Yale School of Art and has participated in a number of national and international exhibitions and residencies, with recent shows in New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, and Helsinki.

Currently, he is working on a web project for Big Red & Shiny and preparing an upcoming exhibit at ‘CAVE in Detroit. His work has been featured in the Seattle Times, NY Arts Magazine, The Times-Picayune and Rhizome @ The New Museum in New York. He is currently the director of the 4D/New Media program at Georgia Southern University.
 

Artist’s Statement: “painter or sculptor, their work has presence and I want to approach this in the infinitely reproducible media of video. The case for digital aura is best supported by the following question: “Is it as hard to delete files from your hard drive as it once was to let go of nostalgic objects?” Media exists almost exclusively as signifiers to events without physical connection to the events themselves.

What was once the accumulation of things from an event (flyers, posters, tickets) are now collected digitally. My videos are a result of aftermarket practices or of the rummaging through an endless, virtual landfill of digital trash. As emotions and experiences become increasingly connected to virtual signifiers, will our emotional intentions be better known? Or, will the speed at which media is delivered make them much more fleeting?

As a new media artist I use a wide variety of mediums to express my ideas. Whether I am casting, building an installation or animating, everything I do is connected to my background as a painter and to fundamental design concepts. The materials I use are varied: 3D printers, motors, video, 2D & 3D animation, screen prints and projections on shaped screens. When I’m making a new series of work or planning ideas for a particular exhibition I try to corral my work around a single concept so that I’m saying a few things with many materials.

Although my videos and three-dimensional works are similar spatially, the narratives in the videos act as ready-made, cultural references. Before the addition of language in my work, my sculptures were formal expressions without narrative. But with language I’ve been able to further synthesize the varied mediums in my installations, allowing micro-narratives.

Most of my work this past year has been focused on reimagining austere philosophical ideals through the lens of consumer culture. In October I did a show in New Orleans, titled ‘Tantric Wealth.’ This was an exercise in the possibility of meditating on symbols of currency and comparing it to the calm relaxed state in which young people find in their smartphones.

In December I did a show in Philadelphia titled ‘Leveling the Genres,’ where I used recognizable cartoon characters as a way to describe Jurgen Habermas’ explanation of modern continental philosophy. I am preparing for my next show in Detroit titled ‘Bad Infinity,’ which will be based on Hegel’s idea of infinity gone wrong.”

www.dereklarson.net

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PAM LONGOBARDI
 
Read the great article about Pam on ArtsAtl.com, one of a series on our Finalists!
 

Longobardi, an Atlanta resident, has had over 40 solo exhibitions and 65 group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US, China, Italy, Spain, Finland, Poland, Japan, Germany, Greece and Monaco. Her artworks are in numerous collections both public and private.

A recipient of many awards, Longobardi is Professor of Art at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia and created the Drifters Project in 2006, an ongoing environmental art intervention involving photography and installation focusing on the cultural artifact of contemporary life, the plastic object, and its impact on the global ocean.

She exhibited this work in Beijing at NY ARTS/Beijing during the 2008 Olympics and at ARTLIFEfortheworld in Venice for the 2009 Venice Biennale ARTE VISIVI collateral exhibitions. Edizione CHARTA (Milan, NY) published a book on her project titled “Drifters: Plastics, Pollution and Personhood” in 2010.

Recent exhibitions include Voyages on an Uncanny Sea at Gallery Diet in Miami, a commission of new work for Oceanomania at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, curated by Mark Dion, Sarina Basta and Cristiano Raimondi, and at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin.

Sponsored by the Anchorage Museum, Alaska Sea Life Center and the Smithsonian Institution, Longobardi is lead artist on the 2013 GYRE expedition, a scientific/artistic research project by sea along Alaska’s remote shores. The expedition will be presented in a documentary film by Emmy-nominated JJ Kelley of National Geographic, and the exhibition, with support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rauschenberg Foundation, will be documented in a book published by the Anchorage Museum.

In an ongoing long-term project in conjunction with the Ionion Center for Art and Culture, Drifters Project 2013 returns for its third year to the island of Kefalonia for cave and near shore excavation and collection, in collaboration with the Greek Naval Academy of the Ionian Islands and an archaeologic project called A.Sho.re. A feature-length documentary is in progress with projected release in 2014.

Artist’s Statement: “I am a conceptual artist with a strong affinity to materials and process. Collectively, both these aspects of my practice explore the Anthropocene [modern era, dominated by humans}. Plastic objects are the cultural archaeology of our time. These are objects with unintended consequences that become transformed as they leave the quotidian world and collide with nature to be mutated, transported and regurgitated out of the shifting oceans. I have made scores of interventions, cleaning beaches and making collections from all over the world, removing thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situating it in exhibition context for examination.”

www.pamlongobardi.com

www.driftersproject.net

www.consciousocean.org