Winners of One Hundred Days 2012

One Hundred Days is an international competition for emerging artists organized and sponsored by Contaminate NYC. The competition is open to artists working within the realm of Visual and Installation Art, including sculpture, installation, painting, photography, design, and illustration.

Contaminate NYC is a creative enterprise that aims to be an integral tool for cultural growth, social change, and engagement. We believe that the performing, visual, and literary arts can be highly effective in posing solutions to our biggest global challenges.

For this first edition of One Hundred Days, artists were asked to create a visual or installation project aimed at raising awareness about sustainability issues, demonstrating the creative potential of fine arts with regards to environmental, social, and economic issues and the potential role of art in a much needed societal transformation.

One Hundred Days believes in the need to create imagery that ultimately hits the public consciousness with the seriousness of climate change, and its impact into our lives, and the need for a systemic shift in our economic and industrial model. Artists are challenged to awake the collective moral imagination so the general public can begin to comprehend the change that will be forced upon us if we don’t take action now.

Three different tracks were available for artists, based on the three pillars that commonly define the framework of sustainability:

Environmental: Submissions focus on the study and awareness of creative interactions between people and their natural and built environments and on the protection of the planet and its limited resources from exploitation and neglect.

Social: Submissions should explore social, political, and psychological dimensions of sustainability, including ethical issues related to human inequality, social injustice, and poverty.
Economic and political: Submissions should explore the need and viability of a sustainable economic model that provides fair distribution and efficient allocation of our resources, ensuring that our economic growth maintains a healthy balance with our ecosystem.

Economic and political: Submissions should explore the need and viability of a sustainable economic model that provides fair distribution and efficient allocation of our resources, ensuring that our economic growth maintains a healthy balance with our ecosystem.

Artists had to choose one of the tracks and submit a project/work for the selected category.

2012 One Hundred Days Winners

Environmental: Chia Shan Lee "Never Ending Story," London

Inspired by the concept of information overload in contemporary society and waste of resources associated to newspapers’ production, London-based artist Chia Shan Lee narrates a contemporary fairy-tale - metaphor of social and environmental issues - employing newspaper yarns as story-telling material. Combining critical theory with the creative aspect of textiles and the symbolic meaning of newspapers words, she designed a series of installations with the purpose of raising awareness on the issues of newspaper recycling and resources waste.

Social: Jey Lee, "Hollow," London

"Hollow" - a photographic cinematic sequence presented by London based artist Jey Lee – deals with the dichotomy between pureness and darkness in children’s night dreams as symbol of the difficulty and loneliness of growing up in an increasingly careless society. In her piece the sky at night become a potential playground where children are allowed to free their imagination in a way that is forbidden to adults, constrained in their status quo.

Economic: Wouter Kalis and Corinne de Korver, "Social Unit," Amsterdam

Starting from a concept reeling around the incorporation of recycled plastics in the manufacturing of smart, multifunctional and positive designs for the sheltering of homeless people, Amsterdam-based duo Wouter Kalis and Corinne de Korver have designed a sustainable bed unit for homeless shelters. Designed for the Salvation Army, it combines a bed and storage on 3 square meters and is it made out of recycled plastics, bottle caps, and beer crates.