2012’s Selected Emerging Artists are:

Shawnee Barton nominated by Erika Torri, Athenaeum Music & Arts Library

Lauren Carerra nominated by Patricia Frischer, San Diego Visual Arts Network

Noah Doely nominated by Leah Ollman, Art Critic

Rob Duarte nominated by Tristan Shone, artist

Alexander Jarman nominated by Amy Galpin, Curator, SD Museum of Art

Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli nominated by Natalie Haddad, art writer

Lee Lavy nominated by Ann Berchtold, Art San Diego Contemporary Art Fair

Ingram Ober nominated by Adam Belt, artist

Vincent Robles nominated by Susan Street, Susan Street Fine Art Gallery

Deanne Sabeck nominated by Debra Poteet, Collector, SD Art Prize committee

David Leon Smith nominated by Sally Yard, Professor, Art History, SDSU

Brian Zimmerman nominated by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, artist

Emerging Artist Definition: artists who are emerging with new, fresh ideas. This is not about the age of the artists or the exposure they have had, but what art they are creating now and in the past three to five years.

SD Art Prize 2012 Established Artist recipients are Arline Fisch and Jeffery Laudenslager.  They will be announcing their choice of emerging artists to mentor later this year.

The 2012 nominating committee, which changes yearly, consists of San Diego ART PRIZE recipients for the previous year, writers for the San Diego ART PRIZE Art Notes, Honorary Hosts and the San Diego ART PRIZE committee: ALL emerging artists in the San Diego region are eligible to be chosen by the established recipients each season, including, but not limited to, nominated artists in this and previous New Contemporaries exhibitions.

Selected winners of the San Diego ART PRIZE 2012 will be featured at the Art San Diego Contemporary Art Fair:  September 6^th – 9^th, 2012 at the Balboa Park Activity Center – 2145 Park Boulevard, San Diego 92101.  Hours: Fri and Sat, Sept 7^th & 8^th from noon to 8pm, Sun, Sept 9^th from 11am to 5pm.  For more information please contact: Patricia Frischer 760.943.0148 or Ann Berchtold 858.254.3031.

a phrase long time associated with the 1960’s/70’s minimalist art of Los Angeles, where the highly polished surfaces of the artwork were said to mimic the level of depth associated with its inhabitants. Labeled so by East Coast critics, this style of work has often been compared to bright buffed-out hot rods and shiny resin surfboard decks. However, like many art styles, its finish fetish nickname was in part its creation as a defined group, and the work continues to thrive in present day with its focus on surface, color, and light. A majority of the works associated often use alternative art materials such as plastic, glass, light and polyurethane resin creating a shiny smooth hand crafted surface of physical and or metaphysical reflection. Similar to the work of sensory artists in the 60’s and 70’s, recently on display in Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, this show touches on the obsession of a minimal surface and the enticing pull that it has on the viewer. This form of minimalism could even fall into the category of pop – faceless, uncluttered pop where the surface is the subject and the viewer’s perception of this surface is relevant over the philosophical or conceptual ideas that could possibly clutter the experience.

Lisa Bartleson was born in Seattle and received her Bachelors of Art Degree in Biology at the University of Northern Colorado.  She is a scientist, a sculpture artist, and a painter.  Her sleek cast resin wall sculptures, and her works on panel, which use a distinctive technique composed of layer upon layer of gradated painted plastic, create serene color compositions that steadily draw the viewer into a meditative state of purity, evoking a contemplative sensuality.

Born in Canada, Casper Brindle moved to Los Angeles in the early 70’s. Raised by an architect and a fashion designer, and immersed in the arts, his work reflects the Southern California lifestyle; including a series paying homage to the essence of surfing and the ocean’s infinite breathe. With renown light and space artist Eric Orr as a mentor, Brindle, has managed to create a new visual voice amongst a body of greats that came before him.  Combining mediums such as LED lighting, acrylic, wood, and flawless epoxy coatings, Brindle creates a calming cohesive body of work that’s infused with vibrant color, which is representative of his energetic lifestyle.

Seattle based artist, Alfred Harris, has been exhibiting throughout the United States since 1978. His work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Seattle and Portland Art Museums.  Sealed under a sheen coat of resin, Harris’ works are composed of various shreds of once organized compositions collaged with positive/negative space, tracery, and line drawings.  His use of color, line, and reflection creates a sense of serene balance and intrigue for the viewer of his work.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Kristina Quinones received a bachelor’s degree in Printmaking from the University of Connecticut and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. The process behind Quinones current bodies of work challenges the boundary between control and uncertainty. Her unorthodox painting style, which uses her whole body and the happenstance movement of paint, allows her smooth, vivacious liquid like surfaces to bring their pop of color alive at their own pace.

Ernest Regua recently received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he found his passion in pushing the abstraction of form. Influenced by natural and built environments and an array of art movements from Surrealism, Contructivism, Pop, and Minimalism and inspired by his years as a California longboard surfer and native, Regua, meticulously sands down layers upon layers of gesso to create a glossy smooth surface before beginning his paintings. Within his pieces, color and shape play in an imaginary space to create tense and humorous interactions upon his labor-intensive canvas and wood surfaces, where an element of surprise and contemplation is often worked in to askew the initial interpretation of the viewer.

Jay McCafferty attended LASU for his undergraduate work and continued on to UC Irvine to complete his MFA. His photographs, videos and paintings have been featured in numerous museums and galleries since the early 1970’s. Looking back at thirty years of work reveals an essential consistency: Focusing sunlight through a magnifying lens at grid intersections plotted on paper, canvas and wood, entertaining the accident of phenomenology and introducing chaos to the rational field. His current work involves further dematerialization of the matrix and continues to use his carefully executed solar burn grids as an organizing device to express the formalist grid as more liberating than constraining. McCafferty keeps his process simple and up front while pushing to reveal the intellectual and emotional resonance of the work.

“A square of wall hosts burned fragments appearing free of the picture plane and signaling a new relationship between the wall, the work and the spectator.” – Jay McCafferty

Miguel Osuna studied architecture in Guadalajara before moving to Los Angeles where he began painting full-time in 2002. His work shows in galleries in California, Mexico and Spain. Osuna’s new series, “Infinite Within,” is a departure from his motion-based emotive landscapes in oil. Inspired by theories of universal origin, its extension and its limits, the artist is now looking inward rather than outward to his surroundings for inspiration. He considers this new body of work to be a “prequel” to the more conventional abstract landscapes he has produced in the past. With an incomprehensible level of detail, his ballpoint pen strokes on resin play with the concept of infinity and the endless connections between multiple points.

“In my studio, I am always experimenting with new techniques, mediums, and ways to create, I find it stimulating.  Shifting mediums is refreshing for me, and it inevitably leads to new visual effects, or new ways for me to interpret ideas.“ – Miguel Osuna

Michael Brennan

Philip Buller

Paul Gibson

Josh Goldberg

Sheldon Greenberg

Bob Nugent

Stephen Pentak

Nancy Sansom Reynolds

Curtis Ripley

Will Robinson

John Patrick Salsbury

Stephanie Weber

This first exhibition in our new location is a tribute to the lives of our artists.  It has been an honor to be a part of each artist’s journey and a witness to their passion and commitment toward creative discovery.

“I value those artists who embody the expression of their life.” Wassily Kandinsky

Josh Goldberg’s large chromatic paintings work with forms in space.  His choice of forms and their placement create the tension and energy between them, holding together the structural balance of the visual surface.  The color flattens, gives the illusion of depth, and dissolves or unifies into atmosphere.  There is a keen delight in the contrast of tone, the simple and complex, the carefully rendered and gestural.  These elements – space, form, pattern, atmosphere and color – are pulled from the outer limits of the surface into a center of gravity or nucleus, fixed forever and floating.  Although the subject matter is the medium itself and its manifest forms, there is always a subtext of meaning informed by Goldberg’s lifelong interest in poetry and literature.

Jamie Chase’s deliberately ambiguous figures constantly seek new territory while remaining grounded in a philosophy of evolutionary consciousness.  Each piece refers to all the others that have gone before while addressing a new facet of his ongoing thought.  Chase works with the fundamentals of perception: the human experience, the personal environment, and the way the two interact with each other.  His figures, at times so abstract as to seem like columns of pure internal energy, are inseparable from their environments, which can also be seen as external fields of energy.  As a work of art, it is finished at some point, but as a thought, it is a gateway to others.  Always there remains a certain enigma that is never entirely resolved.