Artist Mary Ellen Croteau was working on an artwork involving plastic bottle caps, creating tall endless strings that are strung vertically in colorful columns. She repeatedly noticed how some of the caps would fit neatly inside of one another creating new color combinations similar to the portraits of Chuck Close. Inspired, she became sidetracked and embarked on her own self portrait using the colors that “naturally” appeared in the bottle cap plastic.

This work was submitted by John Mangahas as part of the Curatorial Contest of Awesomness that was held this past week on Facebook. We received nearly 100 submissions and the six winners and the awesome work they brought to my attention will be blogged about over the next few days. Side note: I had Megan help me sort through the 90+ submissions, and of our individual lists of the “best” six items, four were identical. What!

Missed out on all the action? Don’t worry, based on the success of this contest I’ll be doing another one soon, probably here on the blog itself. For now, go ahead and follow along via Facebook or Twitter as there’s lots of stuff happening in both places that doesn’t always end up here!

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