winners, contest 10: a humument, tom phillips
We are pleased to finally announce the results of our latest contest. Our sole judge and juror, Tom Phillips has selected a winner, a runner-up, and a highly-commended from among the many excellent submissions. Congratulations to Alan Beattie, Jeanette Walsh, and Ali Francis Garcia.
Alan Beattie, Winner
Jeanette Walsh, Runner Up
Ali Francis Garcia, Highly Commended
There were many fantastic and intriguing entries and we are delighted to feature some of our favorites below.
Anne Hars
Lynn Skordal
Chris Westbury
Rory Walsh
Alisa Golden
Roland Vazquez Rodriguez
Ingrid Ruthig
Of special note is the work of Ana Quintas, who writes:
My work was inspired by World War I, more specifically the Battle of La Lys (known in English as Battle of the Lys) that took place on 9th April of 1918. On that day, the 2nd Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (which was incorporated on the British Army) was attacked by German troops that were trying to pierce through Allied lines. The Portuguese troops were decimated. Everyone who wasn’t killed was taken prisoner. My great-grandfather was in that battle and he was taken prisoner. After the war was over, he returned to Portugal just to die soon after due to exposure to German poison gas.
I used two photographs of him in my work, which tells the experience of a soldier immediately after the battle. I imagine him seeing the dead scattered around him, broken bodies, pieces of metal. I tried to convey in my work a sense of disjointedness, a progressive dehumanization of the body and the soul. I wanted also to convey a certain claustrophobia. I imagine a net of channels that criss-crossed one another like branches on a tree. Those channels would represent the trenches and also the curves of the river Lys, except those curves were not filled with water but with dirt and blood.
All images in the work are my own: the background texture, the photographs of the metal pieces and the photographs of my great-grandfather (these are photographs of old photos). The background texture was made by crumbling a piece of paper, burying it on a plant vase, pouring water, digging up the paper and digitalizing it. The numbers ‘19’ and ‘18’ I cut from a newspaper.
Ana Quintas
And Raymond Harmon provided as his entry an animated .gif “using a method of hand editing the code in the compressed jpg to reveal hidden color and form.”
Raymond Harmon
