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On Wednesday, February 11, SFMOMA celebrated the opening of its biennial SECA Art Award, honoring artists Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen, who were selected from a group of exceptionally gifted individuals in the local art community. The 2008 SECA Art Award exhibition (on view February 12 through May 10) and its accompanying catalogue showcase their work, offering a window on the early careers of some of the most exciting and innovative new artists working today. The award is administered by SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), an SFMOMA art interest group.

SECA co-chairs Marjory Graue and Marianna Stark, along with SECA curators Apsara DiQuinzio and Alison Gass were pleased to host a fine crowd of local and national artworld luminaries during the VIP reception, including artists Kerry James Marshall, Robert Bechtle, and Keegan McHargue, as well as New York art impresario Jeffrey Deitch, local gallerist Jessica Silverman, and Oakland Museum curator René de Guzman.

The 2008 awardees share an interest in exploring the possibilities and limits of visual forms of communication in our image-saturated culture. Their fascination with this theme inspires their work and
serves as the topic of the lively roundtable discussion with exhibition curators Apsara DiQuinzio and Alison Gass that is excerpted in this catalogue. As the exhibition demonstrates, each artist engages questions of representation in a distinctive way. Auerbach investigates the logic of representational systems in series of drawings, prints, paintings, and mixed-media works that isolate symbols drawn from a range of communicative forms, including the Latin alphabet, Morse code, and even the patterns of television static. Holman’s playful multichannel video installations draw on the 1980s sitcoms Roseanne and The Cosby Show to examine TV’s impact on the relationship between fantasy and reality in popular culture. Grounded in his knowledge of art history, Kantor’s practice responds to the wide circulation of images that is uniquely possible in the digital era. Appropriating various sources, his paintings unite the visual language of modern photographic technologies with more traditional modes of representation. And Paglen draws on his training as a geographer and as a visual artist to chart the classified activities and systems of communication undertaken by the U.S. military. His striking photographs and mixed-media installations incorporate visible traces of these typically invisible operations, illuminating some of the most shadowy and mysterious aspects of the contemporary American landscape.