Jury’s Statements about the 2019 Shortlisted Artists

Dana Michel

Constant Surprises - intimacies and small gestures. Strength and physical ability, resisting presumptions and testing suppositions.  Dana Michel makes work in order to see better and know better.  She explores an archive enlivened through performance.  Lifetimes of experience animated.  Interiorities.  Intuitive making with objects that become ... Free!  A remarkable poetics of movement and imagery, bound up in an ethically-engaged approach to making and sharing. Modest and accurate, measured and structured.  A faltering stagger reminds us to keep moving.  A dreamlike character  -  charismatic and absurdist.  We commend this clarity of performance, engaged in identity ... dreamlike and touching in its way. A powerful presence of a female body.  

We commend your vision and your creative path towards remarkable, unexpected images.  Striking, clear images that arrive and disperse unexpectedly.  Multitudes of memories wrapped into live art.  Everything here matters, everything sounds, everything vibrates into our shared experience.

Cuqui Jerez

What makes theater?  Things move, and we move because of them.  Floating, soaring, falling, alongside surges in sound.  Again and again, we repeat, with changes in tone and texture; color and light fly by in an open expanse of time. The things resist: they are alive and random, and inanimate and structured at once. Digression. Contemplation.  Dancing in response to gravity.  An Active Uncertainty becomes manifest.  Who is backstage?  An empty stage is not empty.  The politics of beauty in a choreography of dramaturgy.  An urgent sense of scale, with an attention to detail.  An intellectual, devoted artist living in a love of art. Live art as a personal exploration, becoming manifest because it must.

Keijaun Thomas

Keijaun reminds us that live art can transform how we feel in a second. To work through love and care as an artist - to take care of the audience in an encounter.  We commend the strength of a voice questioning identity that encourages us to question our own.  What are the relationships between people and identities? How can we move towards each other?  This work is a raft.  It helps us imagine to not be afraid of touch.  Live art is a powerful form that can marginalized and disenfranchised Kijuan show us that live art is the perfect for the work; a true space for expression which may not be found in other art form practices. Bravery, intention, and the ability to create emotions through ritual. What are we going to do? We need you to help us imagine.  

Mammalian Diving Reflex

Art is a social practice; we practice to live. Mammalian offers an amazing body of work that connects people, who become the artwork itself.  The process of building a life is/as performance.  The interplay of spontaneous responses and youthful curiosity.  What if we could talk about these things in public?  What sort of worlds could we build?  Wondering at playing, and playing at wondering, we stretch the encounter towards its inevitable futures as an unforgettable experience.  What can we learn by participating in such an exercise? What is it to be vulnerable? How can we stand among each other and tell truths?  Giving voice to marginalized people through a dynamic, strong process.  A testing out for new ways to live together. A social and artistic endeavor to network people across difference.