Juliette Losq Catlin Art Prize Finalist Number 1
Juliette Losq is one of the 5 finalists for the Catlin Art Prize over the next 5 days we will be featuring all five of the finalists.
Image:Myriorama (c) Juliette Losq -.
This is Juliette’s main piece to feature as part of the Catlin Art Prize 2011 exhibition it is a large scale myriorama – a take on the Victorian children’s playing cards, which, when next to one another, can be moved around in any order to create a panoramic landscape. Juliette is interested in Victorian optical devices such as the panorama, the diorama and the myriorama and the ways in which the Victorians used these devices to present landscape as a spectacle.
Below Juliette answers a few questions from FAD followed by her biog.
1 If you weren’t an artist, what else would you be?
I’d love to be a field zoologist working in the Amazon
2 Name 3 of your favourite artists.
Samuel Palmer, Walton Ford, Reece Jones
3 What was the most intelligent thing that someone said or wrote about your work?
“Through her pictoral recording of place and the accompanying insinuation of grim melodrama, Losq stands in for the anonymous illustrators as well as the ‘common reader’ of the Victorian age, hungry for lurid stories of scandal and sensation from the seamier side of life. The viewer thus finds himself in a vaguely voyeuristic position, simultaneously lulled by natural beauty and goaded by implications of naughtiness.”
Stephanie Theodore- Psychogeographical in Ink: The Wunderkammer of Juliette Losq
4 Do you care what your art costs? State your reasons!
Pricing work is very difficult and in the past I’ve relied on people like former tutors for a consensus.
I was advised on my BA course at Wimbledon College of Art that as long as you don’t decrease your prices at a later date, thereby annoying anyone who bought earlier work, then you can’t go too far wrong.
5 What are the three big ideas that you would like your work to express?
I’m interested in the philosopher Henri Bergson and his theory that the past is bound up physically in the current moment, driving time forward – like a comet’s tail – and being carried along with it.
I’m constantly questioning my interest in representing the landscape, and I carry out research into the ways in which my vision of the landscape has been (re) framed historically. I’m currently looking at the ways in which the Victorians used optical devices to present the landscape as a spectacle. I’m reading about how they used functions of doubling and repetition in dioramas and moving panoramas to present scenes of ruin and disaster for the viewer’s meditation and delectation. The abundance of Gothic abbeys and deserted or crumbling dwellings in these devices ensured that they became associated with mortality and the unfamiliar. I am interested in transposing these uncanny themes and effects to the contemporary derelict and marginal landscapes that form the basis of my work.
More generally I want to convey the notion of the symbolic ‘Clearing’ in my work: the place where order and civilisation meet chaos and wilderness. I try to evoke in these hinterlands the primal notion that a step in the wrong direction might lead to the forest snatching you into its depths.
6 How do you start the process of making work?
For me the most important thing is to have good photographic sources. I am constantly looking for new environments to explore, both in London and beyond. I’ll then make a series of excursions, take hundreds of photographs, and start working them up into collages in my studio.
7. What’s next for you?
I’m about to be included in a group show in Edinburgh, organised by an artist-run initiative called Sunbear Gallery. The show will be part of the Embassy Annuale 2011 festival in June.
Image:Wunderkammer (c) Juliette Losq
JULIETTE LOSQ BIOG
Born London, 1978. Lives and works in London.
Education:
2007 – 2010 Royal Academy Schools, PG Dip
2004 – 2007 Wimbledon School of Art, BA: Painting
2000 – 2001 Courtauld Institute of Art, London, MA History of Art
1997 – 2000 Newnham College, Cambridge University, BA Hons., History of Art, 2:1
Selected Exhibitions:
2011 On the Brink, SW1 Gallery, 3-26 February http://www.sw1gallery.co.uk/exhibitions/pastexhibitions.aspx
2010 Pulse Miami, with Theodore art, December. Juliette Losq / Darren Norman / Eric Poitevin with Theodore Art at Ecoartspace 53 Mercer St. NYC 10013
Group Exhibition, the Drawing Gallery, 11-19 September
2009 Life of Wood, GS Tower (1F), Seoul,1 – 29 September Royal Academy Summer Show
2 x 2, Fred [London] Ltd 45 Vyner Street, London, E2 9DQ, 19 June – 2 August
Premiums 2009, Royal Academy of Arts, March
LECG Project, Davidson Building 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA, March
40 Artists 80 Drawings, The Drawing Gallery, Shropshire, March-May
2008 Summer Exhibition at Galerie Aalders, La Garde Freinet, July 5-23
2006 Drawing Breath: surveying 10 years of the Jerwood Drawing Prize, touring
Different Views: Sharon Beavan, Jane Dixon, Juliette Losq, Barry Martin, Keir Smith, The Drawing Gallery, London.
Royal Academy Summer Show.
London Art Fair, Art Projects with The Drawing Gallery.
2005 Hans Brinker Trophy Exhibition, Amsterdam.
Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London and travelling exhibition.
Prizes:
Dunoyer De Segonzac Award 2010, Royal Academy of Arts
Dover Arts Club Award 2010, Royal Academy of Arts
The Gordon Luton Award for Fine Art 2010, The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers,
Runner-up.
Excellence in Drawing Award 2010, Dover Street Arts Club, Second Prize Winner
Excellence in Drawing Award 2009, Dover Street Arts Club, Second Prize Winner
Celeste Art Prize 2007 (shortlisted)
British Institution Award 2006, Royal Academy Summer Show
Celeste Art Prize 2006 (shortlisted)
Jerwood Drawing Prize 2005, First Prize Winner
Undergraduate Drawing Prize 2005, Wimbledon School of Art, First Prize Winner
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