The Brink is a biennial award that spotlights the work of an artist who resides in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia and is in the early stages of a promising professional career. This exhibition honors the recipient for his or her innovative work. The award-winner receives a prize of $12,500; in addition a work by the artist will be acquired for the Henry Art Gallery’s permanent collection.

This year’s recipient is Andrew Dadson from Vancouver, BC. This presentation, the first solo museum exhibition of Dadson’s work, will explore the artist’s intensive fascination with the material and the metaphor of the monochrome. His photographs of lawns painted solid black or white focus on the urban environment as a zone rife with borders; these works suggest voids that have become part of a mysterious, and possibly contentious, narrative. They prefigure his current canvas paintings that transfer the (literally) painted landscape into the realm of abstraction. Dadson utilizes the very materiality of thick layers of paint — applied to multiple canvases standing on the floor and leaning on the wall and each other — to reinforce his allegorical interest in boundaries. Dadson asserts that “Everything has boundaries; the delimitations between such can be static and opaque or permeable and imagined. In my practice, I search for the spaces and opportunity to then question where such boundaries begin and end.”