Awards given at The Pilot's annual contest for students

NORFOLK

Last October, Erin Ayres stole warily into an abandoned house on the Eastern Shore. She had permission to be there, so she could photograph the old place.

But she felt drawn to gather curious items, and later wondered what she would do with them. One way she devised was to take the old kitchen drawers she filched, line them with old, handwritten letters, and punctuate the piece with spools of thread and perfume bottles.

That piece, which she titled “Unveiled Tokens of Lonely and Deserted Past,” was among two works that earned Erin the $1,000 first-place award at The Virginian-Pilot Student Gallery.

The top awards were announced Tuesday night at the Chrysler Museum of Art, where works by the contest’s 62 finalists are on display.

Erin, 17, is a senior at Arcadia High School in Oak Hall, on the Eastern Shore. She lives in Modest Town, near Nelsonia.

Touring the house, Erin knew the property soon would be sold. “I felt that if the house was going to be destroyed, I wanted to preserve something from it.”

A second work by her at the Chrysler Museum, “A Step Into the Quiet Solitude of a Forgotten Life,” incorporates an old banister, vintage books and photos of the home.

Erin said she wanted to impart “a sense of a life that was once there, and the pieces of people that still remain.” Her choice of a wall construction was inspired by the late artist Joseph Cornell, who made similar sculptural assemblages.

This year’s top winners resulted from a third round of judging. The first two jurors selected nude artworks for first place. Those judges were Aaron De Groft, director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, and Scott Howe, director of education and public programs at the Chrysler Museum.

The Virginian-Pilot, the contest’s main sponsor, declined to honor those choices.

“One was a nude self-portrait of a 17-year-old girl, and we didn’t feel that was appropriate,” said Pam Smith-Rodden, director of marketing, the department that runs Student Gallery. The other piece was a sculpture.

“We’re thinking about the audience, and all the kids and the younger siblings who will see these pieces,” Smith-Rodden said.

Those artworks are still on display at the Chrysler. “We honestly don’t believe those two pieces are appropriate to be held up as the winners of a high school art show, because they do depict the nude,” she said.

Student Gallery has no policy against nude imagery, Smith-Rodden said. “It hasn’t been an issue in the past, but we’re going to revisit it for future shows.”

The final judges were Beverly Shepard, marketing manager of The Virginian-Pilot and Hunter Spencer, strategic design leader and an award-winning artist in the advertising department of The Pilot.

The contest is open to any high school junior or senior in the region. Artwork by this year’s 30 honorees, or runners-up, will be on display April 8 through May 2 at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia in Virginia Beach.

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com