SAMANTHA KNOPP WINS BMO 1ST ART PRIZE

Samantha Knopp, Celadon Stack

Congratulations are in order for Emily Carr Award Winner Samantha Knopp: it has just been announced that she is the British Columbia regional recipient for the BMO 1st Art! Award. 

In Celadon Stack, Knopp pays clear, but subversive, homage to Donald Judd - a sixties-era sculptor whose minimalist works challenged notions of the role of craftsmanship in the art object. Where Judd produced works in factories, using industrial materials to create consistent geometric forms, Knopp meticulously shapes them by hand, essentially turning the central idea of Judd's Stack on its head. The result is a quiet reorientation of the minimalist practice that speaks just as much about those high ideals as it does about the tradition of ceramics in domestic forms.

"I've always been intrigued by the idea of opposites," Knopp writes. "I am interested in staging possible reconiliations, bringing seemingly irreconcilable things or ideas together as I play with order and chaos, quiet object and grand display, and ideologies of modernist thought and manual craft." 

Knopp's brilliant vision rewards her with a cash prize of $5,000 from BMO. Her work will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto alongside fellow 1st Art! prizewinners from October 2 to 27, 2013.