CHICAGO, IL.- The Rose Art Museum and Stephen Haller Gallery announced that artist Sam Jury will be honored on November 1st with the 2011 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Award. The award honors emerging artists on the cusp of international acclaim. Roxy Paine, Barry McGee, Dana Schutz, and Alexis Rockman are among the past recipients.

The Perlmutter Award, which includes an artist residency, will culminate with a solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum scheduled for Fall 2012. The museum, celebrating its 50th anniversary this fall, is located just outside Boston on the campus of Brandeis University. Famed for its extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art, the museum is also famed for its recent controversy surrounding the possible sale of that collection by the university. The controversy, which had riveted art world attention around the world, has concluded with the collection intact and the museum continuing in its mission. The Rose has a great deal to celebrate this fall.

Best known for her hauntingly beautiful photography-based work and video portraits in light, Sam Jury "weaves a contemporary web of illusion and wonder into scenarios of her own design," writes Michael Rush, former Director of the Rose Art Museum. Rush, now founding director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, first acquired Jury’s work for the Rose. Art in America’s Edward Leffingwell describes Jury’s work as “Ethereal, cinematic and literary in their affect… infused with a mysterious play of figure, palette and light.”

Jury’s artwork, a thousand pities I, proved a popular addition to the Rose's collection having been exhibited three times since its acquisition in 2007 starting with Rush's exhibition Invisible Rays: The Surrealism Legacy, followed by The Rose at Brandeis: Works from the Collection, and this fall’s Collecting Stories highlighting the history of the museum’s acquisitions.

Sam Jury’s practice examines the psychological impact of mass media and screen based technologies on society’s relationship with reality. She explores the gaps and fissures between moving and still imagery; painting and film. Her work originates from staged photographs or documented acts sited in overwhelming or unsettling locations giving a contemporary edge to the sublime.

Jury confounds the viewer’s expectations of realism by creating highly manipulated scenes where linear narrative is compressed, compromised, or suspended. Hovering between any specific time, place or genre, Jury’s work creates a world made up of associative readings. Working in the intersection between old and new traditions, her work references classic landscape painting and portraiture; yet is forward thinking and technologically nuanced, with associations as disparate as Vermeer and sci-fi, Constable and Cameron. Jury is creating a new landscape, a new portraiture. This is a painter-in-light for the digital age.

A truly international artist, Jury’s first artist residency was in Sharjah UAE. She has collaborated internationally with China’s Gao Brothers and has exhibited in Beijing and Pingyao. Jury was the subject of solo shows forever is never at the Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell, and Still and Still Moving at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, where she was artist in residence. Her video another thing coming screened at the Festival International de Arte in Murcia, Spain. Exhibitions include Art After Dark at the Louise Blouin Institute, London and currently At 50: The Krannert Art Museum, 1961-2011. An excerpt from her video all things being equal can be seen on the Brooklyn Museum’s website.

Sam Jury graduated with an MFA in painting from Cornell University followed by a two year Fellowship at the Royal Academy Schools, London completed in 2002. She has lived and worked in the USA and Middle East and is now based in the UK. Sam Jury is represented by Stephen Haller Gallery.