The prodigiously talented Briggs draws as well as Dürer, but her sgraffito medium is unique. She attacks black scratchboards with X-Acto knives to reveal the white underneath, "drawing" with her blades to make drawings as intricate as any old master's. The violent technique was tailor-made for this year's work, inspired by the death and disorder on the Southwest border and in Mexico. During a New Mexico residency, Briggs ventured daily into dangerous Ciudad Juarez and made apocalyptic drawings of the chaos in that crowded city. She conjured up the victims of the Mexican drug wars and the migrants who die in the American desert. Tim Mosman is Briggs' opposite number, a pure modernist who sticks with abstraction. His charcoal and gesso drawings are loose and fluid, choreographies of line and curve that dance across his thick papers.
Runner-up:
Tim Mosman
Conrad Wilde Gallery
210 N. Fourth Ave.
622-8997, conradwildegallery.com
