The absurdity of artist prize competitions is on full display until the end of August at the Gardiner Museum with five nominees up for judgment in the annual RBC Emerging Artist People’s Choice Awards– which is not to say it’s a bad exhibition. In fact, I’m going to encourage you to see it. However, your response at the ballot box, after perusing the candidates, will say more about you than the worth of any one artist. Which is also not to say art can’t be judged (if that were the case, I’d be out of a job), but to select an artist here is like choosing a religion. They all worship clay, but their (and, by association, your) preferred treatment of the earthy matter really amounts to a difference of individual worldview. 
Derya Akay, cyclodrum, potbound & soup from stone, 2015, installation detail
At one end of the spectrum is Lisa Henriques, who makes pots for the pottery crowd and, given the mandate of the host institution, is likely to win over the most support. At the other end is Derya Akay’s chaotic installation of suspended fragments of clay smears, kitchen detritus, fermenting vegetables, arcane wooden hoists, and paint-stained walls. Akay is most likely to speak to the contemporary art crowd (his less exciting window work at Kunstverein Toronto might still be on view) with his exuberant playfulness and the radical impurities he introduces into the world of craft. Next to him is Veronika Horlik whose two-part sculpture links the cosmos, mythology, and Japanese video games to tree planting and forest fires. The abundance of narratives imbedded in her works work to redeem the formal incongruities of the pair (one is a magnificent but cheesy star, the other an ungainly blob). Next to Henrigues (but not close at all) is Zane Wilcox whose perceptual experiments and highly formalized designs will appeal to neo-Platonists and all those who seek order in the universe. Somewhere in the middle is David R. Harper, whose collection of stones, bones, teeth, and skulls are as anally organized as Wilcox’s symmetries but bound to an obsession with natural history and the transformations humans impose on particular objects. His work is church-like in its restrained contemplation (and somewhat troubling in its appropriation of artifacts from other cultures), but I lean more to the Dionysian party that Akay gets underway. To find out where you stand on this ecumenical path, you’ll have to see the exhibition for yourself.
Gardiner Museum: http://www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/home
RBC Emerging Artists People’s Choice Award continues until August 30.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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RBC Emerging Artist People's Choice Award at the Gardiner Museum
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