Nipper's large scale photographs continue her investigations into human relations in time and space. Nipper's works, some of which measure as large as four by six feet, contain a striking realism that make them intriguing. She uses the strengths of photography to cast doubt on what we think we see. She establishes a complex and interrelated set of relationships through a series of shots, bringing out the similiartities, yet suggesting something of the formal poetry in still lives. The subjects seem quite real, but Nipper's positioning of them, and the repeated shots seem to suggest that the photographs have been manipulated.

Sasha Steensen's A Magic Book: An alternative history, offering alternative myths, of the founding of the United States of America is published by Fence Books as the Alberta Poetry Prize winner for 2004. Where religion must be erased and where industry is a given, magic steps in with its hoaxes and promises. In A Magic Book, Sasha Steensen deftly inscribes,
using treatise, factoid, rhyme, and timeline, the choices we have made culturally, against a belief in invisibility: What we have not seen, must not
be, "never harm nor spell nor charm"

Sasha Steensen is co-editor of the journal: "Kiosk: A Journal of Poetry, Poetics and Experimental Prose" and a founder and co-curator of the Buffalo reading series, ANOTHER. She is the author of the chapbook "Correspondence," a collaboration with Gordon Hadfield, forthcoming from Handwritten Press. She holds a
BA in History and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is currently completing
a PhD in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo.

Girls' Night Out was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and was curated by Deputy Director of
Programs and Chief Curator Elizabeth Armstrong and Curator of Contemporary Art Irene Hofmann. After its
presentation at the Orange County Museum of Art, Girls'
Night Out travels to the Addison Art Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Contemporary
Art Museum, Saint Louis; and the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston.

the magic scrapbook
has been overturned
and mighty heaps
cast out of hiding

In another place, the course and channel of rivers is turned clean away
and forced backward:
backward, the river is forced in another place and clean channel (of) course is turned away.

The earth is sometimes knit together again, sometimes left wide open, sometimes somewhat
open, somewhat closed, sometimes open and then closed, closed and then re-

-------------------------------------------------opened.

The piece, Full to Wailing and Back Again, is a large scale outdoor projection installation which evokes the cyclical pattern of the phases of the moon. Wendy Wischer has recently begun to achieve national recognition for her multi-media installations that use advanced technology to bring us closer to nature, rather than distance us from it. Born in Wisconsin, Wischer received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her MFA from Florida State University. Her exhibitions include Art Projects at Art Basal Miami Beach, The Bass Museum, The Miami Museum of Science and the Miami Art Museum.

For Wischer's Award, the foundation purchased Full to Wailing and Back Again and donated it to the Miami Art Museum.

The recipient of the 2003 Alberta Prize for Poetry is Rosemary Griggs. Her manuscript Sky Girl will be published by Fence Books in the upcoming fall. The poems in Sky Girl provide a remarkable, lyric portrait of our ever-changing world as it is reflected by those who make their living in the skies above us. From far off and quite near, these poems observe with a kind but unstinting gaze the trials of the flight attendant, and provide an intimate look at the changing realities of life in the air after 9/11. These poems jet to parts known and unknown – Saginaw, Phuket, Isoka, Maui, a getaway, a layover, the great blue yonder – inspiring affection and sympathetic fear and loneliness wherever they travel. The poems are as varied and exploratory–and often very funny – as they are deeply humane. Sky Girl is also, of course, an unusually timely and topical book of poems.

Rosemary grew up in Illinois, received her BA in English from the University of Iowa and completed an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Recently Rosemary Griggs' first play The Letter Witches opened this winter in San Francisco at the Phoenix Theatre. She has supported herself as a flight attendant for over six years.

For Candiani's award, two works from the artist's series of personal advertisements were donated to the San Diego Museum of Art. El Novio and La Novia (at right) are banners, male and female, with sewn portraits of the individuals listing the ads and statements about themselves and their desired mate. There are several different faces and statements that can be detached and reattached in different combinations. All of the information is real and came from old magazines of the 1950s and 60s, another common source of inspiration for Candiani.

Born in Mexico City, Candiani is a self-taught artist and an avid reader. After studying literature in college, she returned to her childhood passion for art-making. Her art has been included in several group shows in Mexico–at the Casa de la Cultura in Tijuana and the Museo de Monterrey–as well as in the United States–at Cal State Los Angeles and the Flux Gallery in San Diego. Candiani was recently awarded a residency for the summer of 2003 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.

Tina Celona's poems unite the contraries of perception (the "real moon") and imagination ("the moon in my poem"), to realize "the real moon of poetry." This allows her free rein in both realms ("my dream and my body") since, after all, they are one. With her keen eye and fine sense of rhythm, she can include a chaotic world, a vague family, a difficult farm, a singular loneliness--all in what sometimes seems a side glance. This is a fine collection and, one fervently hopes, only a beginning.

The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems were selected by the editors of FENCE Books, together with the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation. The Foundation provides a grant in support of the production costs of the winning book as well as providing a substantial cash prize directly to the poet.

FENCE was launched in 1998 as a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, art and criticism. FENCE has a mission to publish challenging writing and art distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. FENCE has published works by some of the most esteemed contemporary writers as well as excellent work by complete unknowns. FENCE actively supports young writers who might otherwise have difficulty being recognized because their work does not "fit in" to either the mainstream or to accepted modes of experimentation. FENCE Books is an extension of that mission, providing expanded exposure to poets and writers whose work is excellent, challenging, and truly original

Sarah Sze has earned due respect from the national and international art communities for her expansive and often whimsical installations. Her aesthetic is one of accretion, in which the refuse of daily life sneaks into the hallowed halls of fine art. Matchsticks, houseplants, and even mattresses have all found their way into her fabrications. Each of Sze's sculptures is tailored to the environment in which it appears. Originally Sze began the construction of her works on the floor, but the pieces have now migrated to walls or even to the ceiling. With such experimentation in position, Sze creates a sense of vertigo and explosive energy.

These effects are surely produced when viewing Drawn, Sze's sculpture that was purchased for the 2001 Alberta Prize in Visual Arts. It is on display in the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and has entered the museum's permanent collection. This particular award served to educate and enrich the local community through the exposure to an important contemporary artist like Sze. It also marked the artist's first solo project on the West Coast. As for the artist herself, the Alberta Prize "enabled [her] to take on the challenging project of a site specific work." Drawn is installed in a glass-walled stairwell, visible from the main entrance. This suspended placement gives the piece room to breathe and increases the drama already suggested by its composition and lighting.

Sarah Sze received her BA from Yale University and then continued to study art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she completed her MFA. Sze has been featured in several important one person exhibitions, including a show at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and numerous group shows such as the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the 1999 Venice Biennale. In addition to the Alberta prize, Sze received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1999. Her extensive bibliography includes articles in ArtForum, Art in America, Flash Art and the New York Times.

Sze lives in New York City. She is represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery.

The formal invention and wild personae of Chelsey Minnis' Zirconia represent a progressive yet individualized position in the galaxy of truly contemporary poetry. Zirconia's female speaker is by turns fatigued, charmed, wishful, battered, sly, perverse, and omnipotent. These poems engage a material world not unlike ours yet featuring a phantasmagorically elliptical relationship to the dimension of real action. Her speaker is detached, but alive to the poignancy of detachment, and speaks through the "silver lips of a feverish child" to invite connectivity by means of tenderness and brutality. One is compelled to follow trails of feminine intuition, savagery, ennui, fantasy, and intimacy to their diabolical, fruitful conclusions. Zirconia is accessible, confrontational, hilarious, occasionally shocking, never dull, and often extremely moving.

Chelsey Minnis is a graduate of the University of Iowa WriterÕs Workshop. She currently lives in Colorado

A powerful tradition lies behind Jacci Den Hartog's quirky sculptures. The silky rivulets of plastic in the work pictured above are meant to conjure running water, particularly as it appears in Chinese landscape painting of the Sung Dynasty (10th to 12th centuries) and Yuan Dynasty (12th to 14th centuries). Her engagement with Asian art history has stretched to other areas of artistic production, particularly her sublimely austere ink drawings that form a suite titled The Liminal Garden. But Hartog's concerns are not limited to the long-gone. Her work also engages with contemporary art and culture.

Any viewer familiar with art of the last century may perceive the lack of sculpture based on landscape. Hartog's work creatively fills this void, as does work by a few other California artists like Michael Pierzyniski or Jennifer Pastor. This has lead to interesting critical speculation upon the formation of new school of Los Angeles art. At the same time, Hartog seems to be giving artistic expression to her surroundings quite literally. Given that Hartog is based in Los Angeles, with Disneyland nearby and Hollywood's film sets in her midst, it is not surprising that her interpretation of landscape can end up looking so unreal to our eyes.

Passing a Pleasant Summer was the centerpiece of Hartog's one-person exhibition in Santa Monica's Christopher Grimes Gallery in 1997.

This particular show received much attention from the Los Angeles art community and really seemed to mark a turning point in the artist's development. It is therefore fitting that the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation chose to purchase this piece in conjuction with the award of an Alberta Prize to her. Hartog feels that the particular importance of this award for her lies in its "acknowledgement that the work is important" and in "the recognition that comes with having one's work in a major museum collection."

Jacci Den Hartog completed her BFA at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregan, before coming to Southern California where she earned her MFA at Claremont Graduate School in Claremont. She has had important one person shows at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH and the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco. She was also selected to participate in the Orange County Museum of Art's 1999 Biennial. Hartog has received grants from the Ludvig Vogelstein Foundation, Art Matters Inc. and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Hartog lives and works in Los Angeles. She is represented by the Christopher Grimes Gallery and also shows with the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.

Quiltmaker Elizabeth Talford Scott began her craft in 1925 at the age of nine under the teaching of her mother. The artist has continued this tradition, passing her knowledge of on to her daughter Joyce who is also an artist. After moving to Baltimore, MD from South Carolina in the 1940s, Scott stopped quilting until the 70s when she was encouraged by friends and family to pursue her talent once again. While some might consider Scott's medium too old-fashioned for contemporary art, the artist has continuously and courageously reinvented her medium. This places her firmly within the decorative arts movement taken up by other feminist artists of the 70s like Faith Ringgold and Miriam Schapiro. Scott's art also gives a voice to African-American tradition from which her own artistic medium sprang. The very process of stripping together fabrics is derived from West African cultures. Scott uses a wide variety of fabrics in her creations and stitches various other materials into their densely patterned surfaces. As seen in the detail to the right, the viewer might encounter a sack of stones enclosed in a plastic onion bag from the grocery store.

Fanciful creatures, such as the birdlike figure to the right, signal the powerful imagination of Scott which is equally demonstrated by her titles and statements. The artist's retrospective held at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art was titled "Eyewinkers, Tumbleturds and Candlebugs: The Art of Elizabeth Talford Scott."

In the exhibition catalogue, Scott explained the "tumbleturds" in a typically frank yet mysterious manner: "They're beautiful bugs but very, very unclean because they tumble from the cow, the chicken, the animal's manure. They bundle them into balls and they lay their eggs in them. That's why they call them tumbleturds. They look just like a beautiful bug."

In addition to her retrospective, Elizabeth Talford Scott's art has been recognized in a number of ways. Her work has been exhibited with that of her daughter, a mixed media performance artist, in many East Coast galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum of Harlem and the Smithsonian Institute. The Split Rock Arts Program at the University of Minnesota has a fellowship named in her honor and the WomenÕs Caucus for Art gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.