2023
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2023 Artist Recipients
The 2023 San Diego Art Prize exhibition features the work of Mely Barragán, Anya Gallaccio, Janelle Iglesias, and Joe Yorty. Together, these object-centered works explore a range of issues from temporality, love, and gender, to consumerism, human ecology, and lived complexities inherent to our border region. The artwork challenges the viewer’s way of looking; what you initially see, is not always what is.
The exhibition’s title is adapted from Vija Celmins’s sculptural artwork, To Fix the Image in Memory, for which the artist recreated replicas of rocks she had collected. According to Celmins, the idea of fixing an image in memory comes from her discovery that in order to create an exact likeness, she had to master a new way of looking that is counter to how we are programmed to see as humans; we look in gestalts, abstractions, and anthropomorphisms versus literal details of what is in front of us.
The viewer is encouraged to use the title as a key to interpreting the work on view. Using the word “object” in the exhibition title, invites the viewer to consider the various meanings this opens up as a key to interpret the work: “Object” can mean to disagree, or refer to a literal object, person, or thing to which a specified action or feeling is directed, such as a love object. “To fix” can mean to secure, to set, to heal, or repair.
The exhibition’s title is adapted from Vija Celmins’s sculptural artwork, To Fix the Image in Memory, for which the artist recreated replicas of rocks she had collected. According to Celmins, the idea of fixing an image in memory comes from her discovery that in order to create an exact likeness, she had to master a new way of looking that is counter to how we are programmed to see as humans; we look in gestalts, abstractions, and anthropomorphisms versus literal details of what is in front of us.
The viewer is encouraged to use the title as a key to interpreting the work on view. Using the word “object” in the exhibition title, invites the viewer to consider the various meanings this opens up as a key to interpret the work: “Object” can mean to disagree, or refer to a literal object, person, or thing to which a specified action or feeling is directed, such as a love object. “To fix” can mean to secure, to set, to heal, or repair.
Catalog Writers |
Justin Duyao, Writer, Editor, and Creative Director HereIn Journal, San Diego, CA
Melinda Guillén, Ph.D., Writer, Art Historian, Curator, La Mesa, CA Chris Kraus, Writer and Filmmaker, Los Angeles and Ensenada, Baja California Elizabeth Rooklidge, Independent Curator, Educator, Director, HereIn Journal, San Diego, CA |
International Guest Selectors |
Pedro Alonzo - Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas
Kathryn Kraczon - Director of Exhibitions of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) and Chief Curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence Rhode Island Susanna Temkin - Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, New York |
Mely Barragán
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Mely Barragán (b. 1975, Tijuana, México) works with various media transforming prefabricated images into identity constructs. Mely Barragán is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist born and living in Tijuana, where she studied Graphic Design with a specialty in Visual Arts at the Universidad Iberoamericana. Her aesthetic objectives have focused on exploring the role of identity and of women within the power schemes of society. Her work questions the existing visual formulas and addresses the consequences of human and gender relations; reflects on obsession, the absurd, the beautiful, the grotesque, nostalgia, time, the behavior of human relationships, etc. Play with words and compositions creating a fragmented atmosphere. Barragán has individual and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, China and several European countries, being awarded several times and having obtained various scholarships. she has carried out artistic residencies in Cleveland, Beijing, Moscow, Monterrey, Oaxaca, Chiapas, among others. She was co-director of TJINCHINA Project Space, which has carried out an interesting exchange of contemporary art between Tijuana and China. Currently she co-directs Ruta Terrestre, an agro-cult-tourism project that promotes cultural and sustainable development in Vallecitos, B.C., Mexico. Her work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), the Tijuana Cultural Center (Cecut), Stanford University Libraries special collections, Elias Fontes Collection, among others.
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Anya Gallaccio
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Anya Gallaccio (b. Paisley, Scotland Lives in La Mesa, California) work is about process and materiality rooted in the physical, but also the psychological, or spiritual. She creates site-specific installations, often using organic materials as her medium. Past projects have included arranging a ton of oranges on a floor, placing a 32-ton block of ice in a boiler room, and painting a wall with chocolate. Due to the nature of these materials, her works undergo natural processes of transformation and decay, often with unpredictable results. Referencing the art historical genre of landscape painting, Gallaccio’s work is heavily influenced by her own environment. In 2008, she moved from London to southern California, resulting in a shift in materials as she responded to the landscape of the western United States. Since then, she has become more focused on geological history and uses local rock species like limestone, sandstone, and granite as materials. Her work references the minimalist structure of artists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd as well as following artists such as Robert Smithson in the tradition of Land Art. As part of the generation of Young British Artists, Gallaccio was included in the now legendary 1988 exhibition, Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst at the London Docklands. (courtesy Lehmann Maupin website)
Janelle Iglesias
Janelle Iglesias is an artist working with and through objects, materials and their physical language in space. Ranging from simple displays to complex constellations, her work often explores the relationship between humans, capitalism and the natural environment. In addition to her individual practice, Janelle maintains a project-based collaboration with her sister, as Las Hermanas Iglesias which incorporates a variety of relationships and structures for collectivity. Her individual and collaborative work has been shown widely, including at the Queens Museum, Sculpture Center, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Art Center, El Museo del Barrio, The Utah Museum of Fine Art’s ACME Lab, and The University of Colorado Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Janelle has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Smack Mellon Studio Program, Headlands Center for Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, LMCC’s Workspace Program in NYC and Paris Program at the Cité Internationale des Arts among others. Her work has been supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation– through which she traveled to the rainforests of West Papua in search of the displays of birds of paradise and the constructions of Bowerbirds. Janelle Iglesias has an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University and BA in Cultural Anthropology from Emory University.
Joe Yorty
Joe Yorty is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a range of materials, objects, and methods to make work that largely addresses the anxieties and absurdities of American domestic culture. Including sculpture, collage, video, and photography my studio practice grapples with the stuff of thrift store refuse, last-minute estate sale deals, and the occasional dumpster dive to rub against the pathos of the ceaseless search for fulfillment in the accumulation of things that, to a large extent, defines the American experience in the 21st century. His work has been shown on both coasts of the United States and some places in between. He was born in southwest Utah, raised in Southern California, served 11 years in the U.S. Navy, and received an MFA in Visual Art at UCSD in 2013. Yorty currently lives and works in San Diego where he serve as the founding Creative Director for the non-profit gallery and project space BEST PRACTICE and the co-owner and operator of JOEHNS, a small neighborhood coffee shop.
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San Diego Art Prize presented by:
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