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Brookside 2009 ZAPP Jury |
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other art
show jury reviews |
| The Process |
| The images were projected but monitors were
used for scoring. The jurors could see the thumbnails on the monitors and
if they clicked to enlarge them they were able to read the individual
artwork descriptions (example).
Occasionally a juror would ask for the images to be paused and click on a
thumbnail to enlarge it on their computer to read aloud the individual
description so they could better understand what the artist was trying to
do. One of the jurors was extremely irritated with misspellings. |
| It was a good experience having the jurors
together in one room. I wouldn’t want to jury at home because the
interaction with other jurors causes you to think more about what you’re
seeing, especially if a juror wanted to stop and question what they were
looking at. Jurying alone you have to catch yourself from only selecting
the kind of work that you like. |
| The jurors were encouraged to fill in the
comment line (example)
to give feedback to the artists because the director felt that for the
price of the jury fee, the artists deserved the feedback. Luckily one of
the jurors could type in the dark so they put in the comments from those
jurors that had them. |
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| The Words |
| Artists really need to work on the individual
artwork descriptions, balancing their technique vs. what they are trying
to get across to the jurors. Some artists would get lost in the wording of
their technique. One that stands out is that ceramicists had a tendency to
specify how hot their kiln was, and unless you’re a ceramicist, nobody
cared. You want to have enough information about the technique that the
jurors can tell how complex or simple the process is. |
| One of the artists said “free beer for the
jury at my booth if I get in”, in their artist statement. |
| The Booth |
| If we were looking at the images and couldn’t
quite grasp what the artist was doing, we’d go back and forth to the booth
shot. |
| Somebody is plunking their booth down in the
middle of a background. It was cute once but there were three or four
people doing the same type of thing. The jurors commented “what was that”
the first time and “there it is again” the second and third time they saw
something similar. |
| I saw jeweler’s booth pictures that didn’t
have any jewelry in their booths and it didn’t work well. |
| Some first year artists put in their
statement that this is their first professional show and the booth is
borrowed from so and so and they will be purchasing one just like it, so
this is a picture of so and so’s booth. |
| The Images |
| A few of the non-exhibiting artist jurors
commented that it’s the image that counts and they didn’t care how the
artist got there, which is why it helps to also have working artists on
the jury to balance the perspective. |
| One of the comments that came up about
photography (from a photography instructor on the jury) was that there
were some very good wildlife/nature photographs that were, or similar to, stock images
that were available for sale on the internet and whether these
photographers had sold them to the agency or maybe these people are
borrowing other people’s images, though one photographer this was
mentioned about did get into the show. |
| Backgrounds don’t matter as long as they’re
not distracting. I don’t think it mattered as long as it worked with what
they were doing and were not a distraction from the artwork itself.
Certainly good lighting makes a huge difference in jewelry and pottery.
The last time I juried a show was about ten years ago and we would see
paintings with grass or a picket fence behind them. We don’t see anything
like that anymore. |
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The artist who let me do this
interview prefers to remain anonymous |
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