21st ANNUAL NATIONAL JURIED COMPETITION

Axis Gallery presents the 21st Annual National Juried Competition, a group exhibition featuring works selected by juror Sharon Butler, founder of Two Coats of Paint. The exhibition includes works by artists from around the country in a variety of mediums.

JUROR’S STATEMENT

The Axis Gallery received 658 submissions to an open call, and I could have selected five exhibitions instead of one without feeling professionally compromised. Narrowing such a high- quality profusion down to a single hang was a real challenge.

Whereas traditional thematic trawls tend to be self-limiting, open calls like this one afford the juror no circumscribing guidance – only that of quality on the terms artists set for themselves. And the work I perused made it clear that artists throughout the country and across genres are richly engaged in conversations about ideas, materials, emotional content, and formal issues.

The show’s density is testament to the abundance of pieces that were simply too good to leave out.

Since no theme was handed down in advance, my job was to arrive at a selection piece by piece, submission by submission, until I saw the show take shape from what artists are concerned about and refracting through their work right now. I encountered a gnawing disquiet, an insistence on making things by hand, an interest in place, and the use of materiality and process as metaphor.

Although I don’t believe most of the submitting artists know one another, the selected works seem connected, as if they might mutually complete sentences. And indeed, one virtue of an open call is that it is liable to produce an unplanned consensus – a kind of serendipity that might elude a more deliberately curated process with a long list of criteria.

I’ll admit my own slight bias in the selection. I’m somewhat less interested in traditional technical skill than in inventiveness – in what happens when an artist reaches for something that isn’t supposed to be an art material at all, and in instances