Hamilton, New Jersey
Samantha Doan of Oxford, OH has been awarded the prestigious International Sculpture Center's Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award for 2008. Samantha is a BFA student of the Miami University Sculpture Program.
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) established the annual "Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemmporary Sculpture Award" program in 1994 to recognize young sculptors and to encourage their continued commitment to the field. It was also designed to draw attention to the sculpture programs of the participating universities, colleges and art schools. The award program's growing publicity resulted in a record number of participating universities, colleges and art schools; including over 160 colleges and art school sculpture programs from six countries for a nominated total of 401 students.
A distinguished panel made up of Mary Ceruti, Director of The Sculpture Center; Robert Roesch, Chair of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts; and Dennis Oppenheim, sculptor, selected twelve winners and nine honorable mentions through a competitive viewing process of the works submitted. The selection of the winners from a large pool of applicants, including international students, is a great accomplishment and testament to the artistic promise of the students' work.
The twelve award recipients will participate in the Grounds for Sculpture's Fall/Winter Exhibition, which will be on view from October 11, 2008-April 26, 2009 in Hamilton, New Jersey, adjacent to the ISC headquarters. The artist's work will be included in Grounds For Sculpture's 2008 Fall/Winter Exhibitions Catalogue and featured in the October 2008 issue of the International Sculpture Center's award winning publication, Sculpture magazine as well as on the ISC award winning website at www.sculpture.org.
Johannah Hutchison
Managing Director
International Sculpture Center
Publisher of Sculpture Magazine
P: 609-689-1054
E: johannah@sculpture.org
Home Internvetion: The Living Inside
Mixed media and performance
2007
Home Intervention: The Living Inside was a performance intervention that took place December 1, 2007 in the open fields of a local farm just outside of the Oxford, Ohio township limits. Childhood objects, including a dollhouse, were brought into the space of the foundation of a former house. Over the course of an hour, I reconstructed the dollhouse on the cement foundation.
Home Intervention was inspired by the mystery of a space once occupied by a house that was once a home. The only remains of the house are bricks, nails and cement. Though desolate and haunting in the setting of harvested cornfields covered in frost, the space invoked memories of my childhood home. I remembered re-visitng my old home after being away for years and feeling disconnected - no longer is 1420 West 10th Street my home. It is just another house.
I wanted to change the space of this former home...to quietly and almost playfully intervene in its slow disintegration. I chose to reconstruct my childhood dollhouse room by room and floor by floor. By placing photographs of memories made in each room of my childhood home in the dollhouse rooms, I wanted to infuse meaning into the rooms of the dollhouse and ultimately the now faceless, wall-less foundation of a former home. But I couldn't have predicted that the process itself also intervened with the slow disintegration of my own memory.
Home Intervention is innately personal. The artifacts used during the performance are all from my childhood. The dress I wore during the performance was constructed from the bedspread that was passed down from my mother to me. The dress made the performance more a transformation for me, particularly because the original bedspread is visible in one of the photographs. Despite the personal meaning attached to every object and to the performance itself, I hope the audience will connect with the ideas of life, death, memory, childhood and home.
