TPS National Photography Award

Opening Reception March 10, 2020 6-8 p.m.

TPS congratulates Jaclyn Wright as the winner of the TPS National Photography Award, who was awarded $2,000 along with a solo exhibition. Wright's solo exhibition Marked will run from March 7 - April 18, 2020 at the Sabine Street Studios in Houston, Texas during FotoFest 2020, as part of FotoFest 2020 Biennial Participating Spaces. Please join award winner Jaclyn Wright and juror Natasha Egan at the opening reception on March 10, 2020 from 6-8 p.m. Ten artists were also selected as Finalists for this special award.

Sabine Street Studios is located at 1907 Sabine Street, Houston, TX 77007, and is one of several Sawyer Yards properties that have been repurposed into creative, art-focused venues.

** See the gallery video! In collaboration with Sawyer Yards, we are excited to present a 5 minute video of the show. Jaclyn added narration to accompany the walkthrough. You can view the video here.

About the Exhibition:

Marked combines traditional photographic techniques with contemporary digital processes, performance, and sculpture. The title refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck, which has drawn verbal and physical abuse from strangers. Reproductions of the birthmark’s shape and color appear throughout the work. In Marked, I consider ways we are marked from birth, specifically through gender. Birthmarks are like political boundaries on a map, expressing the concomitant desire to include and exclude, to mark belonging through exclusion and differentiation. The work explores the parallels between human attempts to control, shape, and extract from the land and the body. This is visualized through the demarcation of the birthmark as a means to represent what is through what isn’t.

Both the landscape and the body are tropes represented through photographic surveys, and both raise questions of power, representation and ideology. Photographic surveys of the American West sought to document, aestheticize, and colonize the lands and the bodies viewed through the camera’s lens. These surveys facilitated the movement of white bodies onto the land and native bodies off of it. Photographs of the landscape and the body still carry this trace of privilege and propaganda. Marked responds critically to this history by examining the fraught relationship between the land and the body and its colonization by both patriarchy and photography.

— Jaclyn Wright

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TPS National Photography Award's exhibition Marked by artist Jaclyn Wright is part of the FotoFest Biennial 2020 Participating Spaces:

We are pleased to have foundational support from Texas Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts for this event.

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National Photography Award Recipient

Jaclyn Wright

Award Finalists
Marc Alexandre
Mariana Bartolomeo
Michael Darough
Anna Grevenitis
Sherry Karver
Calli McCaw
Dan Nelken
Catherine Panebianco
Andre Ramos-Woodard
Jerry Takigawa

Statement from the Juror
“It was an honor to serve as the juror for the Texas Photographic Society’s Biennial Photo Award. I was impressed by the high quality of work and the diversity of artistic practices presented, making my task exceptionally challenging. The winner and ten runner-ups each work with a variety of mediums such as traditional photographic techniques, mixed media, and three-dimensional sculpture, with the subject matter ranging from abstraction to narrative to performative, each with conceptual integrity.”

— Natasha Egan

Jaclyn Wright's artist statement:
Marked combines traditional photographic techniques with contemporary digital processes, performance and sculpture. The titled Marked immediately refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck that has continually prompted verbal and physical abuse by strangers and appears in the work through the reproduction of its shape and color. Further, I am considering other “birthmarks” one could attribute to a body, specifically gender and race. I’m interested in how the “birthmarks” of gender and race have affected women though history and in conforming the ways in which this has undermined intersectionality in the history of feminism. I am visualizing these ideas in the production of the work through the masking of film with laser cut dark slides, the masking of my body with handmade skin-suits, and the marking of the photographic prints as a means to represent the nuances of identity. The work oscillates between depicting vulnerability and privilege, employing various ways of representing the body as the primary subject to address the history and future of feminism.

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Texas Photographic Society is delighted to announce the TPS National Photography Award for artists residing in the United States who have a consistent body of photographic work. The recipient will be awarded a $2,000 cash prize. In addition, the one recipient will have a solo exhibition at the Sabine Street Studios during FotoFest 2020, the international festival of photography in Houston, Texas. This call is open to all subject matter, aesthetic approaches, and photographic processes. Two-dimensional work is preferred, and submissions from artists of all levels are encouraged. View the 2018 online exhibition here. This competition is now closed.

Calendar of Events
08-15-19 Deadline for entry (midnight CST)
09-15-19 Exhibiting artists announced and emails sent to all entrants
02-10-20 Work due in Houston, Texas at Sabine Street Studios
03-07-20 Show opens at Sabine Street Studios
03-10-20 Opening reception with the juror 6-8:00pm
04-18-20 Show closes

Awards & Recognition
$2,000 cash prize • Solo exhibition at Sabine Street Studios during FotoFest 2020 in Houston, TX • Inclusion in the Biennial publication guide • Printed exhibition postcards for the FotoFest 2020 Meeting Place reviewers’ bags • International visibility via the FotoFest 2020 website and promotional materials • Jurors may select up to 10 “Finalists," providing additional recognition to entrants. Thank you to Red River Paper and Texas Commission on the Arts for their support of this exhibition and fellowship.

Entry Fee
Entry fee is $45 for 10 images. Join or renew your membership with TPS while entering the TPS National Photography Award competition and save $10 on your membership fee!

Eligibility
The TPS National Photography Award is open to artists of all levels residing in the United States who are developing or have completed a consistent body of photographic work. All photographic-based art is welcome, including digital, silver and alternative processes. You do not need to be a member of the Texas Photographic Society to enter this competition. Current members of the TPS Board of Directors are NOT eligible for entry.

About the Juror

Natasha Egan is an internationally renowned curator and administrator who has served as the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP), since 2011. She has been associated with MoCP since 2000 as associate director and curator. She has organized over fifty exhibitions, some with a focus on contemporary Asian art and artists concerned with societal issues, such as the environment, war, and economics. Egan was a guest curator for the 2010 FotoFest Biennial in Houston, the 2016 Dubai Photo Exhibitions, UAE, and is a guest curator for the 2019 Lianzhou Foto Festival in Lianzhou, China. Egan has contributed essays to numerous publications and periodicals and lectures internationally. For over a decade, she taught in the photography and humanities departments at Columbia College Chicago, and holds a BA in Asian studies, an MA in museum studies, and an MFA in fine art photography.

Prepare Your Files
1. Files should be 1200 pixels in the longest dimension and saved in JPEG format on the highest quality setting. Images should also be saved in RGB color space.

2. Label each file as FirstName_Lastname_ followed by consecutive numbers. For example: Sam_Jones_1.jpg, Sam_Jones_2.jpg, etc. Please don't forget to include the "jpg" extension.

3. Do NOT use spaces in the file name, and do NOT use special characters such as :;’”/?}{()[ ]+=*&^%$#@! (use only alpha-numeric characters).

4. Please prepare the following information for each image: (1) print title; (2) process [Digital print,Silver-Gelatin, Mixed Media, Cyanotype, Gum Bichromate, Platinum/Palladium, etc.]; (3) Size of works; (4) price or NFS.

Sales
TPS encourages the sales of exhibited work. In support of the artists, TPS will not collect commission from print sales nor will Sabine Street Studios. Any sale inquires will be directed to the artist. Please print your name, address, telephone number(s) and price on the back of each accepted piece. If your work is Not-For-Sale, simply note NFS but provide a dollar value for record-keeping purposes. If you do not indicate a sales price, the artwork will be listed as NFS.

Liability
TPS and the venue will exercise all due care when handling your work, but will not be held responsible for loss, damage or replacement.

Reproduction
TPS and the venues retain the right to display and reproduce work accepted for this exhibition for publicity and promotional purposes only. The photographer retains copyright to his/her own individual images. Also, TPS will work with the artist to prepare materials for the Biennial guide publication.

Shipping & Presentation Guidelines
Artist delivers or ships work to Houston and TPS will pay for return shipping (if necessary) within the United States using a common carrier. It is recommended that selected artwork be shipped ready-to-hang using wire or D-rings. If applicable, please use white mats and frames that are gallery quality and complement your work. Color mats are not acceptable. NO glass please; plexiglass only.

Questions?
If you have any questions or concerns after reading all the guidelines, please contact TPS Executive Director directly at sarah@texasphoto.org.