The work submitted to this year’s annual MAG Small Works Show spanned a range of mediums, subjects, and styles. The initial decision-making to choose the exhibition was both straightforward and complicated. When jurying online, I recognize the challenge of truly understanding a work based on a digital image. Photos never fully capture the textures, surface tone, and the way the light reflects off of a work, and even with dimensions, one never fully grasps the scale of the work. Based on the images provided, I made selections with the goal of creating a suitable grouping for the gallery that would stand in dialogue with each other on the walls and around the gallery space. 

After making selections online, MAG requires that the juror wait to make the awards decisions until the work has been received for viewing in-person. Even with the knowledge that the theme of the exhibition was “small works,” there is a range of variety between sizes, and some pieces that I expected to be smaller were larger and vice versa. At a smaller scale, it can be more difficult to represent a physical space or object, some details require great technical skill to make and manage, such as placing tiny dots at the tips of carefully aligned curled paper on a doll’s head or rendering the subtle coloring of fur on a caged chimpanzee. In other cases, the area focused the experience of looking into its own exercise when viewing a horizon through wide cross-hatching or finding patterns in the line patterns cut into the earth from far above. 

Choosing award winners was much more challenging than selecting the entire body of work for the exhibition. It is clear how much talent there is in this community, and this show demonstrates both the technical mastery of artists in their mediums as well as through conceptual practices. What caught my attention the most was the representation of what is arguably a straightforward, everyday subject – a bunch of Bananas as presented by Alison Nicholls. The off-center composition with the exquisitely detailed rendering of the bananas is counterbalanced by the shadow of the bananas on a surface plane, which also very subtly and effectively delineates the three dimensional space that these sit within without having to create a bordered area as a frame. It’s a very smart way to present the subject, and this is why I chose it for the first place award. The second place award was given to Green Tea by Robin Henschel, a combination of teapot and green dragon. With its intricate surface texture and detail, one would be forgiven for thinking it could come to life at any moment and breathe fire rather than tea the moment you grab its tail. The award for third place went to Lynne Lederman for one of her two reduction linocuts, Cambridge Canal, in all of its pink/peach and gemstone colors. The combinations created through the overlapping inks and tightly cut-out details have captured a successful snapshot of an island at the moment of dawn or dusk. And for the honorable mention, Marathon from Above by Marion Schneider caught my attention by appealing to an abstract interpretation while becoming readable as a view from above when knowing the title.

I appreciated being able to choose from so much variety. It speaks well of the MAG community of  artists to have the many art-making practices included in this show. A show like this gives different mediums opportunities to find audiences and educates the viewing public about each of them. I fully believe that experiencing artwork in-person is the best way to understand it, and that is something that I think we should all pursue and reinforce in our communities. There is so much art out there to visit, exhibitions like this one are here for everyone to enjoy and learn from.