Parade Presents: Art Prize

Set up by Benjamin Lebus and Milo Astaire in 2013, Parade has staged two highly successful exhibitions, showcasing work from some of the country’s most cutting-edge young artists. Expanding their repertoire even further, Parade’s third project is an art prize.

Open to anyone under the age of 25, the Parade Presents: Art Prize received an overwhelming 450 applications. The applicants were judged by a panel of distinguished leading art world figures, including fashion photographer Miles Aldridge, art curator and Founder of Paddle 8, Hikari Yokoyama, Head of Contemporary Art Day Sale at Philips, Henry Highley and Founder of Narcissus Arts, Nick Campbell, who identified 23 artists as exciting, original and relevant. The selected artists will be shown in the highly anticipated one-night exhibition on Wednesday 1 July 2015. The evening will conclude with the announcement of the winner of the £1000 grand prize generously donated by Orlebar Brown.

ArtRabbit asked PP to introduce a few of the participating artists and their work.

Pip Marshall
"I am a 23 year old artist based in Camberwell, London. I am a former student of Camberwell College of Arts, and I am now working for Mat Collishaw as an assistant. I am next exhibiting my work in the group show Sunday in the Park with Ed at the Display Gallery in Holborn from March 6th.

The idea of distance plays a key role in the work that I create. In my work, I create small-scale assemblages, consisting of a variety of digital imagery, screens and projections, which I then photograph, manipulate and ultimately blow up into large-scale photographic prints. On a basic level, this calls into question the original scale of the objects. What I am most interested in is how it raises questions of whether digital images can have a scale, and the relationship between digital and physical objects."

Michael Cox
"My practice lies in painting as a form of representation. The paintings are depictions of areas in 21st century suburbia that often go overlooked; we pass them by without paying attention. The urban environment is something we are all familiar with, however, it is in a state of rapid change and renewal, buildings are built on top of the old, constantly being challenged by nature and the entropy of time; where once there stood a hospital there now stands a supermarket.

The paintings are of spaces with stillness, suspense and tension, and feel clunky and awkward to occupy. They allude to the traditional stage set, whereby we are awaiting the arrival of the characters (or the public) to play out a scene."

Jesse Rivers
"My artistic practice is an ever-changing, active stream of work informed by a self-conscious relationship with the act of art making, aesthetics and self-presentation. This is not to say there is not a joy in doing, in making the work, which is fundamental to my studio based approach to creating. I attempt to cross a divide; that of the nervousness I associate with the weighty and grandiose territory of painting, fine art, and that which inspires me to make, with contented happiness, mindlessness.
I am inspired by individuals such as Andrea Buttner, an artist who discusses at length the relationship she has with shame within her work, and the ability to turn this negative connotation into a positive form of doing, using the shame to make. More than anything, it may be a discussion on modesty that inspires me, which leads to the likes of Raoul De Keyser, the now deceased Belgian painter. Sports journalist turned painter in the later stages of his life, there is a cheeky, understood carelessness in his production, that which is acquired only by the idea of the amateur. Embracing a lack of knowledge, intuition, playfulness. I see art practice as an anchor from which to play out the rest of my daily needs. The next five years will be a process of coming to terms with this practice outside of an institutional learning situation.
As well as hopefully building a professional profile with my work, I hope to use it as a basis for a way of meeting like-minded people, forming communities, showing work and continuing to make."

Raphael Giannesini is a French artist based in London working on the question of cultural identity and the construction of exoticism in western culture. He created Giannesini Travel Agency in 2013 to challenge the idea of travel and exploration in our contemporary society. Through the appropriation of digital resources (images, map, video) or the self-generation of his own footage, Giannesini Travel Agency creates videos animation conceived as artificial journey to question the virtual experience of the multiple representations of an elsewhere on the internet. From home, Giannesini Travel Agency explores and investigates the digital version of our world, and promises of escape that pop up in our every day life. Video or screen recordings of his virtual explorations are displayed and anchored into scultural objects. This interlacing of the virtual with the physical creates ambivalent furnitures, moving and still, familiar and distant, domestical and exotic which accounts the fragmentation of our reality booth in time and space.

Parade Presents: Art Prize
@ParadePresents
1 Jul 2015, 6pm
Londonewcastle Project Space