"Phoenix Triennial 2001 Opens Today"
2001-07-28 until 2001-09-23
Phoenix Art Museum
Phoenix, AZ, USA

Organized every three years by Phoenix Art Museum, this exhibition recognizes the latest developments in contemporary art. In the past, the exhibition has focussed on the work of artists from Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This year, Phoenix Triennial 2001, includes artists from Mexico as well, reflecting the global currents in contemporary art. The Triennial is organized by Brady Roberts, the Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, and Beverly Adams, the Museum’s curator of Latin American art.

Celebrating the talents of 18 artists, the exhibition includes a variety of media - painting, sculpture, installations and technology. The criteria used to select artists for Phoenix Triennial 2001 purposefully were broad and elastic. These emerging to mid-career artists were chosen for their mastery of technique and medium as well as for their innovative approaches to art making. Artists also were considered for how their work might inform others in the exhibition. The artists are:

Philip Argent... Argent’s paintings are celebrations of artificial environments, frequently using the format of a car window or windshield to present the rushing spectacle of urban lights, signs and billboards fused with cartoon imagery and contemporary graphics.

Todd Brandt... Bridging high art with the aesthetics of everyday packaging, Brandt strives to create original forms of painting by using mass produced commercial goods.

Jason Eoff... Hyper colorist Eoff creates luscious, candy-coated surfaces in his playfully sophisticated abstract paintings.

Brian Fridge... Fridge uses video installation to design abstract cosmic images with the added element of motion.

Thomas Glassford... Glassford refashions mundane materials from everyday life - aluminum siding, mirrors, fluorescent light tubes - into beautiful objects.

Silvia Gruner... Throughout Gruner’s three-track video installation work, isolation and movement are juxtaposed with union and stillness.

Jon Haddock... Haddock wryly comments on the Internet age through his photographs, which have been produced by heavily manipulating images downloaded from the Internet.

Jacob Hashimoto... Hashimoto explores the intersection of industrial manufacturing and the natural world in this sculpture.

Joseph Havel... What began for Havel as found art installation work with existing shirt labels has evolved into formally and conceptually powerful work on a monumental scale.

Deborah Hede... Finding inspiration in the spare, mountainous landscape of the Southwest, Hede creates highly textured drawings in charcoal and pastels.

Salomón Huerta... Huerta’s saturated pastel colors are drawn largely from print and television advertising. His paintings simultaneously evoke smoothly finished products and the flat, precise, geometrically stylized paintings of the early Renaissance in 15th century Italy.

Mayme Kratz... Using resin panels that encapsulate objects found while hiking, Kratz creates wall pieces that are sculptural, yet viewed like two-dimensional paintings.

Stacey Neff... The organic forms of Neff’s wall-mounted glass and fiberglass sculptures suggest a primordial and elemental visual language.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres... A conceptual artist, Ortiz-Torres’ large-scale photographs raise questions about reality and representation, adding to the surreal nature of the scenes he creates.

Daniela Rossell... By breaking down the divisions between society portraiture, fashion photography and ethnographic photography, Rossell has created an enormously revealing photo archive that documents her extended personal network of family and friends.

Peter Sarkisian... Sarkisian’s video installation work, which addresses the homogeneity, dissemination and consumption of information in modern society, is distinguished by a high degree of illusionism, effective use of sound and conceptual rigor.

Judy Tuwaletstiwa... Tuwaletstiwa’s paintings are a complex synthesis, with enigmatic surface patterns created with basswood and rhythmic calligraphic lines created with feathers.

Pablo Vargas-Lugo... Stylized like Japanese woodblock prints and Chinese painting, Vargas-Lugo’s cut paper collages are precise and deliberate, featuring cataclysms and primordial landscapes.

The Triennial is a juried exhibition. The Phoenix Triennial Prize is awarded to an artist in the exhibition for an outstanding body of work and carries a $1,500 cash award. The Phoenix Triennial Arizona Award, a $1,000 cash prize, is presented to an Arizona artist meeting the same criteria. The Phoenix Triennial Awards are made possible through the generosity of the Eva and Eric Jungermann Family Endowment. Serving as the juror for this year’s Phoenix Triennial awards is Marti Mayo, director of Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Arizona

Other Important Exhibitions in Arizona