Utah Arts & Museums has announced the recipients of their 2014 Visual Arts Fellowship: Wendy Wischer and David Wolske, both of Salt Lake City, were selected by juror Nora Burnett Abrams to receive the $10,000 awards.
Abrams, associate curator at the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Denver, said that of the 165 applicants for this year’s award, these two artists “demonstrated key values that are fundamental to a thriving artistic community: experimentation, ambition, reflection and great vision. Utah is home to painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers; and it is also home to risk-takers and complex thinkers.”
Wendy Wischer is an assistant professor at the University of Utah in the art/art history department. She received an MFA from Florida State University and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wischer creates work in a variety of media, from sculptural objects to installations, video and public works. Much of the artwork is based on blurring the separation between the intrinsic history of working with nature and the cutting edge of New Genre and New Media. “Wischer works with immaterial elements like light and finds elaborate ways to make them concrete. She creates large-scale installations inspired in part by the natural landscape. Harnessing the majesty of this terrain is an ambitious aim, and she achieves this without falling into cliché or stereotype,” noted Abrams.
David Wolske is an artist, graphic designer, typographer and creative director for the Book Arts Program and Red Butte Press at the J. Willard Marriott Library at The University of Utah. “Wolske works with one of the oldest forms of art-making, and his relief prints demonstrate that there is strength and beauty when working in a more traditional medium,” said Abrams. “But he also pushes the medium of printmaking in exciting new ways, urging it to interact with different technologies and experimenting with the different possibilities he might produce.”
You’ll be learning more about these artists in the pages of 15 Bytes as we will be producing, in collaboration with Utah Arts & Musuems, video profiles of each of the artists.
More information on the artists and the Visual Arts Fellowship Program can be found at http://visualartsfellowship.org.
UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Categories: Daily Bytes | Recognized
