WAG Visual Elements 63 The Jurors
The Jurors
Click on the images below to view each juror's biography.
Jurors' Comments
This year’s Visual Elements: Annual Juried Exhibition at the Woodstock Art Gallery adapted to the constraints of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The jury assembled remotely, reviewed the submissions digitally, and finalized the selection virtually. Although this made the selection process challenging at times, the jury is proud to celebrate the artists’ creative achievements. The jury will visit the Woodstock Art Gallery in person in August 2021, when onsite access became possible again, to make the final prize selections.
Submissions to Visual Elements 63 reflected an impressive material diversity. Drawing, painting, sculpture, the decorative arts and photography make an appearance in the final selection, testifying to the rich variety of regional studio practices. The exhibition includes themes and subjects traditionally favoured by artists, as well as new and timely creative concerns. Local landscapes — recorded, remembered and abstracted — reflect the ongoing interest in, as one artist put it, “the movement and mystery of nature.” There is a deep concern for ecology in this exhibition, for the fragility, preciousness, and essential interconnectedness of natural ecosystems.
Other artists have created works that engage with the ideas and experiences that intensified over the past year: the melding of the real and the virtual, temporal disorientation, the use of memory to help us ground and make sense of the present against, in the words of one contributor, “an uncertain future.” But there is also hope on display, or at least images — whether through close observation or formal innovation — that communicate the creative journey’s restorative role.
The jury of this year’s Visual Elements: Annual Exhibition extends thanks to all the artists for the high calibre of work submitted, applauds the exhibition participants, and offers congratulations to the award winners.
— Daniel Cairo, Andrew Kear and Jaquie Poole
