Gerd Koch Award for Excellence

The jury for the Gerd Koch Award for Excellence selects students in the last two years of their degree in Ventura County’s colleges and universities to receive the cash prize. The jury selects work from student submissions to the Emergence exhibition each year.

2024

Jake Ryno

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2024 Recipient

“As an artist I like to communicate through my work. Art is a language in and of itself, and each piece should communicate to the viewer in the unique dialect in which everyone individually digests thoughts and emotions. My intention is not to deliver one specific message, but to provide an ambiguous foundational motif on which the viewer may build their own interpretation with their own pieces of life unique to them. I attempt to strike the viewer with an emotion or unique thought of their own creation. I hope to never strip someones personal meaning to fill its space with my own intentions. My artistic intentions are fluid, ambiguous and personal by design and I hope that any viewer of my work is able to create their own narrative for my art and my artistic intention.”

Jade Bluhm

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2024 Runner-up

“Before it was a potential profession and before it was something that I could study in school, art was simply my way of experiencing and interacting with the world. From my earliest memories I was trying to create and invent, exploring and playing with the possibilities of my imagination. Today creating art is my focus in college as well as my dream career path. As a multidisciplinary artist, I draw from multiple different strengths as a result of my many fascinations. In particular my work centers around my personal experience of reality and how it can be warped and perceived in different ways. I am a daydreamer and my work reflects that, encapsulating what it feels like to drift into another world.

My paintings and sculptures are best described as surreal and naturalistic, while dissecting tropes of classical beauty inspired by the greats of John William Waterhouse and Jules Bastien-Lepage. I combine elements of fantasy and history, using subjects that feel ethereal and unreal while still holding some familiarity in the general consciousness. I admire the storytelling and immersive nature of literature and gain inspiration from historical mythology and anthropology.

Being an artist is an ever evolving life passion for me, I am constantly changing and producing unique works through time. Creating is a state of being for me, without it life would have no color or vibrance. Being able to conjure entirely new things and experience other people’s work is an extraordinarily valuable component of humanity. I learn and grow my mentality and spirit through art. I try to express my innermost thoughts and make myself vulnerable through my work, it helps me navigate my feelings and feel connected to others. I hope that anyone who experiences my art can take part in some sort of escapism, and indulge in fantasy. That people who view my work join in on my intimate perceptions and thoughts, leaving the encounter with an at least slightly altered state of mind. With my lifelong love for the arts I seek to always learn, grow, explore, and improve.”

Madison Lewis

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2024 Runner-up

“My name is Madison Lewis and I am an African American artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Throughout my art career I’ve noticed the fine arts have a long history of Western cultural dominance. In particular, Western art has historically been dominated by a white male perspective. This has led to a systemic exclusion of people of color and minorities.This led me to pursue creating art and objects that represent myself and people like me; whether in a literal or conceptual sense. My artwork portrays themes of intimacy, self-observation, and sexuality. I primarily work in oil paint while occasionally exploring other mediums such as graphite, and oil pastel. Most of my work draws from personal experiences. My work invites viewers to engage with and confront their own perceptions while finding comfort in the complex display of human form, emotion, and desires. My creative process is largely influenced by my interests in aesthetics and sensuality. These elements, as well as personal and community histories, assist in visualizing emotional realities that often come with various facets of everyday Black life. The images are a reflection of my individuality and cultural characteristics I see in myself and my surrounding black community. With careful attention to technique, textures and color I intend to create a sense of visual empathy between viewers and the painted figures. I believe the importance of my work is to provide new lenses through which black womanhood can be represented, understood, and related to.”

Emergence, February 2024

2023

Karly Kennedy

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2023 Recipient

Left to Right: SCIART Board President Daniel Bednar, Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2023 Recipient Karly Kennedy, CSUCI President Richard Yao

“My work is born from a constant admiration of nature. The feelings provoked by experiences in nature, by observing her resilience, vulnerability and abundance are unmatched. Depth, repetition, color and texture are the elements I am drawn to when making. In order to achieve the density of each piece, I rely heavily on time and patience. Both coloring clay as well as making the individual repeated components, forces me to slow down and be present with my actions which aligns me with the slow and methodical rhythms and cycles of nature.

I acknowledge the complex relationship in making work that honors earth while simultaneously using materials that are extractive. I am always seeking ways of being in support of a regenerative art practice and minimizing my studio (and life) footprint whenever possible.”

Alex Lozano

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2023 Runner-up

“I’m currently an interdisciplinary studio artist studying to become a scientific illustrator and conservation artist. Over the course of my personal and professional study I’ve worked in printmaking, costume design, graphic design, general and natural science illustration, sculpture, painting, and book arts. I create my art as a way to study the world around me, to educate, and to express what I can’t verbally. While my work does have deep emotional meaning to me at times, I thoroughly enjoy making art that exists for nothing more than education or to be silly and absurd. This kind of a balance keeps art enjoyable for me, as I value science, art, and being silly fairly equally.”

Emergence, February 2023

2022

Jullianne De La Cruz

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2022 Recipient

Jullianne De La Cruz, February 2022

“The work that I do is highly influenced by the media I consumed growing up. As a kid I was constantly enamored by video games and their ability to make me fall in love, bawl my eyes out, fall in love while bawling my eyes out, and just feel like I’ve spent my whole life heroically carrying the burdens of a beautifully fictional world and its beautifully fictional people. Being at the emotional mercy of a game was something that stuck with me as I navigated my way through elementary, grade school, and even now in college.”

Emergence, February 2022

2016

Andy Lepe

Gerd Koch Award for Excellence 2016 Recipient

Andy Lepe, 2016

Andy Lepe is a previous recipient of the Award for Excellence and current Artist in Residence at Studio Channel Islands.

Andy Lepe received his Bachelor of Arts at CSU Channel Islands, where he graduated with cum laude and the highest program honors for the Art Department. His series “Shifting Balance” is all about play, positive energy and embracing the transitions life takes us on. At a young age he would lose himself for hours at a time playing a mix of different games. Board games, sports, anything that kept his active mind in that childlike mindset of excitement and discovery.

“I developed a mindset practice called “Color Flow” that has helped slow my over stimulated and hyper active mind in order to tune into being present. Embracing calmness and tapping into that gentle rhythmic stream of creative thoughts has elevated my awareness of who I really am.

I’m a geometric abstract artist that creates calm hard-edge paintings with subtle transitions in colors.

I find it exciting to depict our own unique frequencies through colors that uplift, shift and unlock the greatness within.”

Andy Lepe featured in Emergence, February 2022