2020 Curatorial Prize Winner - June T Sanders
Blue Sky Gallery is pleased to announce the winner of Blue Sky Gallery’s 2020 Curatorial Prize: June T Sanders, whose exhibition, What A Body Moves Through, will open at Blue Sky in April 2020.
What A Body Moves Through features recent photographic work by three emerging artists Tyler Clarke, Bryson Rand, and Lindley Warren Mickunas. These images address and expand upon contemporary notions of the body: its ability to channel social and political histories, expand itself through contexts and vessels, and ultimately, challenge our ideas of sexual and gendered realities. The combined work of these three artists is heavy, playful, curious, and confrontational—playing with traditional ‘straight’ black-and-white photographic styles, and elaborating on contemporary visuals of queerness, femininity, and moments of sexual tension. It lives somewhere between document and imagined worlds, allowing for nuance, the ephemeral, and reflections on the ways that we have, can, and will move through our natural and cultural landscapes.
June T Sanders is a photographer, writer, and curator from the shrub-steppes of Eastern Washington state. She lives there still. She is a recent Teti Photography Research Fellow at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and an instructor at Washington State University and the New York Summer School of the Arts. Her work is about gender; dirt; expansions; home.
Tyler Clarke is a photographer living in their hometown of Lynbrook, Long Island. They graduated with a BFA in photography and video from the School of Visual Arts in 2019. Tyler’s work deals with gender through awkwardness, queer phenomena, and escapism in suburban America.
Bryson Rand was born in Phoenix, AZ in 1982 as the son of an Air Force pilot, and grew up living around the world on Air Force Bases. In 2019 Bryson attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and had received an MFA from Yale School of Art (2015), a Masters in Art Education from the School of Visual Arts (2009), and a BFA from University of Colorado (2004). Bryson's first solo exhibition, 'Some Small Fever', was held at La MaMa Galleria (NYC) in 2017. He has shown extensively in group exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Haven, and internationally in Mexico City and Berlin. He has published three books in 2017 and 2018, 'Some Small Fever', 'The Origins of Color', and 'Waters'. His work has been included in many publications, including Der Greif, Dear Dave, Matte Magazine, VICE, and NEWSPAPER and was featured on ArtForum.com. Bryson lives and works in Brooklyn with his husband, Ryan.
Lindley Warren Mickunas is a Chicago-based photographer, editor, and curator. She is the founder of various publications including The Ones We Love and The Reservoir, a collective editorial project on the politics of image making. Warren Mickunas is a 2021 MFA Photography candidate at Columbia College Chicago and Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Most recently, she was published in FotoFilmic's JRNL 2 edited by STANLEY/BARKER and exhibited by Der Greif at Berlin Photo Week.