2023 Explore This! 19 Awards

What a treat to close out 2022 and usher in 2023 with new art and artists. I’m so grateful for the invitation to have juried CPSA’s Explore This! exhibition in its 19th iteration. Online presentations such as this are always so much fun for a curator who most often has to approach her selections with the concrete parameters of wall lengths, ceiling heights, and square footage in mind. Free of those physical constraints, it’s a pleasure to survey the submitted images and evaluate each artwork on its own visual terms, without worry of its actual installation.

As I reviewed the offered artworks, I looked first for those that most creatively rose to the challenge of combining colored pencil with materials other than the traditional paper, or deploying the material in a particularly inventive manner. Beyond these unique approaches, I then sought to craft a selection that would showcase a breadth of subjects and styles, from still life to portraiture to landscape, from lyrical abstraction to exacting photorealism to enigmatic surrealism.

Each artwork now included in the final show is one that held my eye for a sustained period of time—first capturing my attention with striking color or a compelling composition, then holding it with questions: How exactly was the pencil applied? What inspired the selection of the objects depicted? Why does this image feel both familiar and unique? True to the show’s titular and emphatic command, Explore This!, I found myself driven by curiosity as I clicked through image after image on a sort of journey, surveying the landscape of submissions as a whole, then retracing my steps to return to those scenes that called for further investigation or a longer view.

It was such an enjoyable adventure! My thanks to the team at CPSA for the invitation and to every one of the artists for the generosity of sharing their work—the result of so much collective thought, time, energy, and talent—with both me and with each other. My best to each of you for the artistic road ahead in the coming year.