Dan Finsel and Mariah Garnett Named Winners of the 2016 Los Angeles Artadia Awards

Artadia has announced their selection of Dan Finsel and Mariah Garnett as the winners of the 2016 Los Angeles Artadia Awards. Finsel and Garnett will each be awarded $10,000 in addition to lifetime access to ongoing benefits of the Artadia Awards program. Only in its second year, the Los Angeles Artadia Awards accepts applications from any visual artist residing within Los Angeles County for more than two years. Finsel and Garnett will additionally be eligible for the first-ever National Artadia Award, which will be presented at the end of 2016.

Five finalists, selected by Jarrett Gregory, associate curator at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Mark Beasley, curator at Performa, were chosen from the initial applicant pool of 684 submissions. Following that, Gregory and Kris Kuramitsu, deputy director of the Mistake Room, conducted studio visits with all five finalists before selecting the two winners.

In a statement, Gregory elaborated upon the jury’s decision:

“Both Mariah Garnett and Dan Finsel address the complexities of personal identity in unexpected and completely different ways. For Dan this involves acting theory and therapy; for Mariah, research and reenactment. This notion of the self as a malleable and unpredictable entity felt especially relevant to us within the landscape of Los Angeles as well as in the year 2016. Dan’s work called to mind the early experiments of Paul McCarthy or Chris Burden but with a decidedly feminist approach to the body. Mariah’s strategy for filmmaking is thoughtful and effortless even in its layered complexity. She addresses gender and identity in a way that liberates these subjects while bringing them into the present moment with a fresh perspective.”