EXPOSURE 10 Award

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present the winners of the EXPOSURE 10 Award, the second year of its graduate award project, which coincides with Frieze Art Fair. This award aims to provide an opportunity for graduates from a UK art school to exhibit works at Parasol unit in a professional context. Their work is shown alongside the major exhibition at the foundation and at a time when they can benefit from exposure to a wider and international audience. In 2010 Parasol unit collaborated with the Royal College of Art on this project.

The winners of EXPOSURE 10 Award are Leah Capaldi, Kate Liston and Lea Provenzano with works that reflect the breadth of collaboration amongst the Royal College of Art’s various departments. The three artists are showcasing their work at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, to coincide with the main exhibition, Silent Warriors by Adel Abdessemed.

Leah Capaldi’s Sculpture, 2010, on the gallery’s terrace, explores the authenticity and integrity of the performer. A video installation contained within a cargo container the work evokes tension, suppression and claustrophobia, physically engulfing the viewer in a highly sensory and visceral experience. Re-working the physical and experiential limits of performance, the artist challenges the audience’s endurance as she battles to become ‘a sculpture’.

Lea Provenzano presents Hour’s Light, 2010 in the upstairs events room, a video projection exploring the passing and measurement of time. A spectrum of colour, refractions from a glass prism hanging in the sunlight, moves slowly over the head of a hooded figure. Presented around the room are works, or ‘artefacts of very simple acts’ such as the folding or unfolding of paper. Evidence of something that has just been touched, the objects are remnants of a disturbance and the viewer is challenged to imagine what action has taken place.

Kate Liston’s new work installed in the stairwell at the front of the gallery Fire Escape, 2010 has been specially commissioned for the EXPOSURE 10 Award. The work uses the immediate surroundings as its subject and limits. Circuitous and self-reflexive in its nature the piece uses referents as its sole currency. The dual projection involves footage from this space and a theatrical stand in; the attempt to pinpoint in one is mirrored by the futile effort to approximate in the other.

The judging panel for this year’s award comprised Amikam Toren, (Israeli/British artist and founding co-editor of Wallpaper magazine), Elizabeth Price (video artist and RCA alumni), JJ Charlesworth, (associate editor of ArtReview and tutor in Painting, RCA), and Ziba Ardalan, (Director/Curator of Parasol unit).