EXPOSURE 12 Award

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present the winners of the EXPOSURE 12 Award: Lulu MacDonald, Sean Steadman, Dante Rendle Traynor, all graduates of Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London. Now in its fourth year, EXPOSURE Award is increasingly recognised for giving winning graduates from a British art school an opportunity to exhibit within a professional context. The winners of the EXPOSURE 12 Award will show at Parasol unit for one month alongside its concurrent major exhibition: Bharti Kher. They will also benefit from exposure to a wider international audience who will be in London for the 2012 Frieze Art Fair.

Lulu MacDonald (BFA, Fine Art) Lulu’s installations evoke tactile fantasies of a city’s edges and surfaces, creating subconscious and subliminal landscapes. Evolving from a close reading of discourse and neuroses surrounding the condition of the city, Lulu’s work suggests a re-imagining of urban possibilities, unconfined to existing and codified boundaries.

Sean Steadman (BA Hons, Fine Art) Sean’s figurative paintings incorporate aspects of both computer modelling and analogue mark-making; his provisional source material is transcribed and collated onto the canvas using a projector. Building upon this synthetic approach to image making and painting, Sean’s work questions how authorship, collage and depth of field endure a mutable existence through branding ideology, advertising and graphic design.

Dante Rendle Traynor (BA Hons, Fine Art) Dante’s Show explores the presence of intense anxiety as the hyper-meaningful slips into the excruciatingly meaningless. Arbitrarily set in a desperate and dystopian art world, a network of skeletal characters and dysfunctional relationships unfold. Within a landscape of inanimate and semi-animate objects, babbling narrative and low-fi choreography, these actors rapidly form and dissolve. The bearded and babyish protagonist is himself a desperate character: believing he is the artist and curator of this exhibition-within-an-exhibition.

The judging panel for the EXPOSURE 12 Award comprised of Professor Susan Collins, Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art; Andrew Stahl, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Head of Undergraduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art; and Ziba Ardalan, Director/Curator of Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art.