San Diego, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 10/16/2006 --The San Diego Visual Art's Network and SanDiegoArtist.com has established the San Diego Art Prize which is given annually to three established and three emerging artists who have exhibited outstanding achievement in the field of Visual Arts. The Prize recipients will receive a cash grant and an exhibition at the L Street Gallery in the Downtown Omni Hotel. Each exhibition will pair an established artist with an emerging artist. The final exhibition will run from June 2007 - September 2007 and will feature work by all recognized recipients of the SD ART PRIZE.
The second exhibition in the series, Green Acres, Featuring Works by Jean Lowe and Iana Quesnell will begin November 18 with an opening reception from 7pm - 9pm at the L Street Gallery and will be on view through February 18, 2007.
Both Lowe (the established artist) and Quesnell (the emerging artist) have a fascination with places that humans occupy. Lowe’s concentration is on an impersonal level as it relates to “plunked down communities” which she feels have no aesthetic appeal while Quesnell’s interest is from a deeply personal level as she shares specific relationships with the places she inhabits. The visual contrast in their work is strikingly different; Lowe uses a more traditional painterly style while Quesnell works as a draftsman with graphite on paper.
California-based artist Jean Lowe earned her MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1988, the same year she presented her first solo exhibition at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery in Downtown San Diego. Lowe earned her BA at the University of California, Berkeley and was the winner of the first Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Art Prize in 2000.
For 18 years, Lowe has been inspired and challenged to make work that is visually seductive, viscerally engaging, but also provocative in its critique of how we live in relation to other species and the environment. Lowe enjoys creating artwork that tackles difficult issues such as over-development, exploitation of the environment, sex, power, and the widespread mistreatment of animals. “I'm motivated,” says Lowe, “by a desire to stimulate conversation around issues I think are important, and challenged by the desire to do so in a way that is engaging and playful as opposed to dry and didactic.” Her work ranges from traditional painting and sculpture to her most common medium, enamel-painted papier-mâché. “At L Street Gallery, I'll be exhibiting one brand new large scale landscape and a couple of existing works that will hopefully have a nice conceptual resonance with the work Iana will be showing.”
Iana is from the southern states and is currently in the Masters Program at UCSD. Iana’s current work is about temporary living situations, specificity of place, as well as, navigation through the spaces she occupies and intends to occupy. Whether that be a military tent in Bosnia, her car, a studio on the border in Tijuana, or the Omni Hotel (for a week for this project), each incorporates architectural floor plans and schematic rendering with more experiential and ephemeral details. The viewer is initially pulled in to the work by its beautiful draftsmanship and the surprise of its scale but it’s the conceptual underpinnings that seal the deal. She’s quite literally drafting her life and this odd combination of technical drawing and autobiography yields an unexpected and original narrative. Iana Quesnell engages drawing as a mediating tool between her own body and her immediate surroundings. Often painfully honest these exceptional, large scale drawings take into account her every move with excruciating detail. Grab Life by the Horns is a diagrammatic drawing of the vehicle she lived in for seven months. In addition to how she slept in the space of the cab, it depicts the precise area where she parked and how the existing foliage provided a certain level of privacy.”
The L Street Fine Art Gallery is located at 628 L Street across from the Omni Hotel, Downtown