The Ford Family Foundation has named UO career instructor Mike Bray a 2013 Hallie Ford Fellow in the visual arts. The $25,000 award is given to artists who have demonstrated excellence in their work and who show potential for significant advancement.
Bray is a practicing artist and career instructor in the Department of Art at UO. A jury of five arts professionals selected Bray, of Eugene, Cynthia Lahti, of Portland, and D.E. May, of Salem, from 183 applicants for the fellowships. Each receives the unrestricted cash award and will join nine prior Hallie Ford Fellows in a traveling exhibition curated by independent curator Cassandra Coblentz and organized by the Museum of Contemporary Craft.
Bray's conceptualization taps into a blend of pop culture, influences and references that weave sculpture, photography and videos into multimedia installations.
"He is focused on the ways, as spectators, we actively expand and populate cinematic worlds, spinning a keyhole view of a story into something emphatically alive,” the panel said. “There is a fine craft aesthetic underpinning his work, something often underplayed in the digital field. His level of craft is so high you don't question it — it looks flawless."
Bray received his BA in English from the University of Illinois in 1997. He moved to Oregon and completed his MFA in 2008 at UO, where he currently teaches in the art department. He has been exhibiting for the past nine years in solo and group exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois, Canada and Ireland.
In 2012 he received an Oregon Arts Commission individual fellowship and was singled out for the Joan Shipley Award. His commitment to his fellow artists is illustrated in his co-founding and co-director roles at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon, an artist-run studio, installation and performance space that provides a progressive and permissive venue for the visual and performing arts. He also serves as co-founder and co-director of the Coast Time Artist Residency in Lincoln City, Oregon.
"My work explores the relationship between the audience and the spectacle of film,” he said. “Winning the Hallie Ford will allow my work to more strongly enter a larger national and international discourse that I can bring back to the region."
The panel of judges said the artists represent three different practices (conceptual installation, figurative sculpture and found materials), three different ways of being an artist in Oregon, three different communities in Oregon and three different generations. The jurists noted that each is at a pivotal moment of change in their respective practices, and that their work is on the threshold of “something potentially transformative.”
The Ford Family Foundation established the Visual Arts Program in 2010 to honor the late Hallie Ford's interests in the visual arts with the goal to help accelerate an enhanced quality of artistic endeavor and body of work by Oregon's most promising midcareer visual artists and to improve Oregon's visual arts ecology by making strategic investments in Oregon institutions that further the progress of these artists. This $3.5 million, five-year proactive grant program provides a range of resources to assist these artists and the visual arts institutions that further the creation and exhibition of Oregonians' work.
- from the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts