Award Winner: Lydia Eccles
Lydia Eccles is a conceptual artist who explores the effect of technology, especially media, upon psyche, social relations, and life systems. With aliases such as Buffalo Gals, Unapack, and currently, Universal Aliens, Eccles is confrontational and symbolic. Her "communicative actions" - lawsuits, presidential write-in campaigns - explore highly charged real-life situations that have generated much media attention and public discussion. She is currently a director of ONI, an experimental art space in Boston's Chinatown, where she is developing an "artistary," an artist community based upon the economic, political, and social model of a monastery.