Grant recipients 2018

In Memory of Anna-Lisa Thomson Foundation

December 8, 2018 – January 27, 2019

Micaela Cignozzi, Anna Engver, Jonna Hägg, Katxerê Medina and Lourdes González Osnaya.

The In Memory of Anna-Lisa Thomson Foundation was established shortly after the demise of the artist Anna-Lisa Thomson (1905-1952). The primary role of the foundation is to offer “encouragement and support of women artists in their education” in the form of artist grants. The first grant was awarded in 1955. Anna-Lisa Thomson worked as an artist in Uppsala and as a ceramics designer at Upsala Ekeby for almost twenty years.

Grant recipients also receive a sum of 60 000 SEK each and are chosen from the graduating master classes of the country's art academies. The grant recipient exhibition is a collaboration with the foundation. Animated nature – and an interest in the exchange between body, psyche, nature and society is an occurrent theme amongst this year’s Grant recipients. It´s expressed by the complicated movements patterns of a bee’s swarm, layers of organic sediments or abstract impressions of urban or nature settings.

Micaela Cignozzi, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts
- to her elegant, bold, colourful and abstract painting with urban settings and nature as point of departure.

Micaela Cignozzi is a painter. She often works in series where the lines create geometric shapes that lead the eye from painting to painting. In her work, daily impressions are reduced to abstract systems. She works with small subtle changes in life we just pass by through composition, light, depth and focus. In the series Any Day Now, Micaela Cignozzi works with diagonal, horizontal and vertical directions individually on each painting. She only uses one colour and the white canvas in each painting, and the surfaces are painted in different transparent layers.
www.micaelacignozzi.com

Katxerê Medina, Valand Academy of Fine Art, the University of Gothenburg
- to her video run-around, where “Wallraffing” documentaries encounters fiction. In an amusing and disturbing manner, she investigates the power structures of labour, motherhood, and immigration.

Run-around is a two-channelled video installation. Telling stories through sound and image taken from archives, internet and her own camera eye Katxerê Medina blends fiction and reality. The stories open multiple perspectives from where to reflect upon the complexity and inequality of contemporary society. The artists investigate and spies on the Swedish National Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen). By way of a hidden microphone she digs into the backstage of a Swedish welfare state exposed to the effects of neoliberal politics. The performative act has an empowering impact and gives an opportunity to think about issues such as labour, motherhood, immigration and art.

Jonna Hägg, Malmö Art Academy
- to her ability to visualise and make us react on what is hard to grasp by sound and images in a sensitive way.

Jonna Hägg visualise the connection between organism and machine, or the organic and the artefact. By sound, installation and animation she creates environments that can be experienced as both threatening and vibrant alarming while they capture the power resources of nature. Inspired by theories of biology, physics, geology, psychology and geometry she visualises systems and patterns. The 3d animation Controllers is a futuristic and yet realistic vision that deals with Colony Collapse Order, the death of bees and future robot bees that might replace them. What will a future society look like when technology and artificial intelligence may dominate?
https://jonnahagg.com

Anna Engver, The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
- for her charcoal drawings where scripted layers of images creates and associative web of escaped memories.

The motifs of Anna Engvers transfers observations and various fragments in large scale charcoal drawings as a sort of writing method. The starting point is photographs that are applied in a collage layer after layer. The landscape and organic materials creates a sort of sediment where textures are in focus. The images are a panorama of associations that overlaps, hides and illuminates each other, a memory of a shifting landscape of mines and a geological time.
https://annaengver.com

Lourdes González Osnaya, Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design in Stockholm.
- to her way of transcending Mexican mourning rituals into fragile and sensuous textile sculptures in unexpected materials.

Lourdes González Osnayas work revolves around the loss and the absence, is a reflection on tradition, mourning and the importance to remember. It is based on how crafts relate to society in ceremonial contexts. She transfers the innate poetic language of symbolic materials used in rituals around death and commemoration in Mexico into new forms through specific repetitive actions in the making. The sculptures share a point of convergence between the spiritual and the emotional inside an everyday good and the unique physical and transformative quality of the onion, beeswax, corn husks and paper.
www.luluosnaya.com