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D.E. May & Cynthia Lahti: 2013 Hallie Ford Fellows

Thu, 05/30/2013

NEWS RELEASE - Ford Family Foundation

The Ford Family Foundation Names Three Oregon Artists as Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts for 2013

Three Oregon visual artists from Eugene, Portland and Salem acknowledged for pursuit of their practices of art

Roseburg, OR: The Ford Family Foundation (Foundation) today named its 2013 Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts, recognizing three Oregon visual artists for the demonstrated excellence of their work and their potential for significant advancement in their practices of art.

A jury of five arts professionals selected Mike Bray (Eugene), Cynthia Lahti (Portland), and D.E. May (Salem) from a diverse pool of 183 applicants. They each will receive a $25,000 unrestricted award, and will join nine prior Hallie Ford Fellows in a traveling exhibition curated by independent curator, Cassandra Coblentz, and organized by the Museum of Contemporary Craft.

"Our 2013 Fellows have demonstrated a tremendous commitment to their practice of art as well as to their fellow artists," stated Anne Kubisch, President of the Foundation. " “These three artists are walking somewhat different paths but each is conceptualizing and creating stellar work. We couldn’t be happier with the panel’s recommendations.”

After extensive debate and decision, the panel reflected on the fact that the selection of Bray, Lahti and May resulted in the representation of three different practices (conceptual installation, figurative sculpture and found materials), three different ways of being an artist in Oregon, three different communities in Oregon, and three different generations. The jurists perceived that each is at a pivotal moment of change in their respective practices, and that their work is on the threshold of something potentially transformative.
Bray's conceptualization taps into a blend of pop culture, influences and references that weave sculpture, photography and videos into multi-media installations. Critics Comments: He is committed to an exploratory studio practice while simultaneously pursuing faculty tenure at the University of Oregon and devoting himself to the progress of students and that of his fellow artists.

"He is focused on the ways, as spectators, we actively expand and populate cinematic worlds, spinning a keyhole view of a story into something emphatically alive." Because of the interdisciplinary nature of his work, he is always crafting objects, figuring out new materials,, and always open to using the material required to express the concept. "His level of craft is so high you don't question it - it looks flawless". Jury Comment: “There is fine craft aesthetic underpinning his work, something often underplayed in the digital field.”

Lahti's current practice fuses two strains of her past work, miniaturizing the human figure in order to create the experience of empathy for the viewer, to allow people to think differently and more carefully about the human body and the pathos of life. Critics Comments: She has always been a great collage artist and a great sculptor, working in the zone of "barely there" that uses the most subtle, light touch of craft as she explores new forms, textures and palates. Her work is raw, exquisite, intimate and emotionally-grounded; it evinces a deep honesty of feeling. There is something unpretentious, primal, childlike (in her work), but in a really sophisticated way - it's a hallowed tradition of arrestedness." "It's hard to think of the regional arts ecology without thinking of her -- she is like a mineral or something."
Jury Comment: "These strange and wonderful ceramics are an obsessional collection of collage -- part sensibility, part emotion. She mines her work to its most compelling basis."

D.E.May's career spans nearly four decades, characterized by introspection and relative solitude. Critics Comments: He is as an incredibly authentic artist whose work is reductive, poetic minimalism - work that has material sensibility and calls to mind such artists as Sol Lewitt. His is a practice grounded in found material culture -- paper and materials- when manipulated and put in the right context, helps the viewer begin to understand them and their beauty. There is something very transcendent, a stable beauty about it that comes out of recognizing the material presence of these kinds of found objects and how you can accentuate the beauty of it for the experience of the viewer. His work and his living space are one - rarely do you see that kind of overlap in an environment - his studios are works of art in their own right. The work is coming from a place that is very deep, as his engagement with it - really sophisticated work." Jury Comment: We were struck by "the preciousness of the scale of his work, his sensitivity to the materials he uses, and his critical attention to the overall aesthetic."

The Lumber Room is pleased to showcase a selection of work by the 2013 Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts. A public viewing of the work will be held one weekend only, June 28 and 29, from 12 - 5pm, located at 419 NW 9th Avenue. For further information, visit www.lumberroom.com. The panel used the following criteria upon which to base its selection of the 2013 recipients:
-Quality of their work: artistic excellence/exemplary talent and depth of sophisticated exploration evidenced in past work,
-Evolution of their work: whether the individual was poised at a pivotal point in his or her practice and would benefit from a Fellowship at this time of career, and
-Effect of the Fellowship on their work: how the Fellowship goals are consistent with the artist's goals, potential for future accomplishment and capacity both to improve individual work and contribute significantly to Oregon's visual arts ecology.

Panelists included: Dr. George Baker, Professor of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA); Lawrence Fong, recently retired as Associate Director & Curator of Regional Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art / University of Oregon (Eugene, OR); Clara Kim, Senior Curator of Visual Arts, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); Lawrence Rinder, Director, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA); and Prudence Roberts, Art History Professor, Portland Community College, and independent curator (Portland, OR).
ABOUT THE 2013 HALLIE FORD FELLOWS

MIKE BRAY: Installation/Mixed Media - practicing artist and Career Instructor, University of Oregon (Eugene). Bray received his BA in English from the University of Illinois (1997). He moved to Oregon and completed his MFA in 2008 at the University of Oregon where he currently teaches. He has been exhibiting for the past nine years in solo and group exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest, California Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois, as well as abroad in Canada and Ireland. In 2012 he received an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Fellowship and was singled out for the Joan Shipley Award. He was also a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award granted annually by the Seattle Art Museum. His commitment to his fellow artists is illustrated in his cofounding and co-director roles at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon, an artist-run studio, installation and performance space whose mission is to provide a progressive and permissive venue for the visual and performing arts. He also serves as co-director of the Coast Time Artist Residency in Lincoln City, Oregon. Artist Quote: "My work explores the relationship between the audience and the spectacle of film....I want for my work to more strongly enter a larger national and international discourse that I can bring back to the region."

CYNTHIA LAHTI: Drawing, Collage and Ceramic Sculpture - full-time practicing artist. Lahti received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1985). Ten years later she conducted post-graduate work at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. Lahti has exhibited in solo and group shows for over two decades, most recently in Berlin, Germany in 2012. Prior to that she participated in exhibitions in Oregon, Washington, Texas and Romania. In 2011 she was a finalist in the Portland Art Museum's Contemporary NW Artists Awards, and a nominee two years earlier for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation awards. She has created a number of installations and has completed a number of site-specific commissions. Her work is held in the public collections of the Boise Art Museum, Reed College, the King County Public Art Collection and Oregon Health Sciences University.
Artist Quote: “My goal is to create works of art that resonate with honesty and reflect the beauty and chaos of the world....I believe even the smallest artifact can evoke powerful feelings and I draw inspiration from objects and images, both historical and contemporary, that have the potential to reflect beyond themselves."

D.E. MAY: Found Material - full-time practicing artist. May studied with Larry Stobie at Oregon College of Education in the mid-1970s, and owned several galleries in Salem, Oregon over the years. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions since that time in Oregon, Washington, Florida, Utah, New York, Michigan, and California. He was a 2008 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards finalist at the Portland Art Museum, received a Juror's Award in a past Oregon Biennial and a national Art Matters Grant. A number of museums hold his work in their collections, including the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Boise Art Museum, Portland Art Museum,Tacoma Art Museum, University of Alaska Museum of the North, Seattle Art Museum and others. He is also collected extensively by private individuals in the Pacific Northwest, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York and Connecticut. Artist Quote: "The work I do may not be here forever, but it will probably see us out. In the truest moments, I don't look at the work as something I made..... I see it as something that has been here all along. I am concerned with time and temperature and tars and resins and climates. And regions. Stains. The color of glue. Random marks of a traveled space."

ABOUT THE FORD FAMILY FOUNDATION
The Fellowships are one of seven program components of the Foundation's $3.5 million, five-year Visual Arts Program established in memory of Hallie Ford, a co-founder of the Foundation, to accelerate an enhanced quality of artistic endeavor by Oregon's established visual artists who are at pivotal points in their careers, and to improve Oregon's visual arts ecology. Other components include artists-in-residence programs; support for exhibitions and catalogues; small capital projects; grants for unanticipated opportunities; bringing curators and critics from outside the region to Oregon for studio visitations and community dialogue; and funding to acquire seminal works by Oregon visual artists to preserve access to them in the public realm. The Foundation is the sole funder of this program but partners with Oregon's leading visual arts educators, gallerists, museum and arts professionals.
The Ford Family Foundation was established in 1957 by Kenneth W. and Hallie E. Ford. Its Mission is “successful citizens and vital rural communities” in Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. The Foundation is located in Roseburg, Oregon, with a Scholarship office in Eugene. For more information about the Foundation and its Visual Arts Program please visit www.tfff.org.