Shortlist for the 2011 Sobey Art Award
The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Sobey Art Foundation are pleased to announce the Shortlist for the 2011 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s pre-eminent prize for contemporary Canadian art. Following a three-month nomination process and the selection of the 2011 Long List, the Curatorial Panel has finalized the Shortlist for this year’s award.
This year’s curatorial panel was faced with a very difficult task in determining the Shortlist for the 2011 Sobey Art Award. However, it was an exhilarating process, one where diversity of practice and fresh artistic production was always evident. The overall strength of the 25 nominees for this year’s award was such that the jury truly feels that the five shortlisted artists reflect a national current in contemporary Canadian art. The jury would like to acknowledge all of the artists who took the time to participate in this process; it is clear that the future of Canadian contemporary art is indeed bright.
—2011 Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel
The 2011 Short List
Atlantic: Zeke Moores
Québec: Manon De Pauw
Ontario: Christian Giroux and Daniel Young
Prairies and the North: Sarah Anne Johnson
West Coast: Charles Stankievech
Selected work by the shortlisted artists will be featured in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, on view from September 17, 2011 to January 8, 2012. The winner will be announced during a Gala event at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia on October 13, 2011.
The 2011 Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel consists of:
Bruce Johnson, Curator at the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery
Gaëtane Verna, Director and Chief Curator, Musée d’art de Joliette
Marnie Fleming, Curator of Contemporary Art, Oakville Art Galleries
Ryan Doherty, Curator, Southern Alberta Art Gallery
Mary Bradshaw, Gallery Director, Yukon Arts Centre
About The Nominees
Zeke Moores
Born and raised in Conception Bay South, Newfoundland, Zeke Moores uses sculpture to explore the social and political economies of everyday objects and our complex relationships to them. By relying on traditional and industrial methods of manufacturing to alter seemingly unimportant mass-produced objects, Moores transcribes everyday commodities and by-products, into the re-proposed artifacts of our mass culture, questioning their initial creation and the ideologies behind them. In 2001 Moores worked at one of the largest art cast foundries in North America, Johnson Atelier Foundry, Fabrication and Stone yard, Hamilton, New Jersey. It was there that Moores further developed his knowledge and interest in fabrication and foundry production, which has become the focus of his contemporary practice today. Moores has received numerous grants and awards, exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Memphis Metal Museum, Grounds for Sculpture (New Jersey) and the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. He has a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of Windsor. He currently teaches at the University of Windsor and at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Manon De Pauw
Manon De Pauw’s practice takes on different forms, such as video art, installation, performance, and photography. She has held solo exhibitions at Cambridge Art Galleries (2010), SAAG (2010), Galerie de l’UQAM (2009), Optica (2007), Trinity Square Video (2007), Expressions (2005) and Dare-Dare (2003), amongst others. Her work has been shown in numerous events in Canada and abroad, such as the MACM Quebec Triennial 2008, Festival TransAmériques (2008), and the 8è Bienal de video y nuevs medios de Santago 2007 (Chili). It can be found in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Collection d’œvres d’art de l’UQAM. In 2010, she was guest curator at the MACM for the series Point of vue on the Collection. She has toured worldwide with Danièle Desnoyers and her dance company Le carré des Lombes, as a collaborator and video-performer. She lives and works in Montreal and teaches in Concordia University’s Photography department.
Christian Giroux and Daniel Young
Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have been making art together since 2002. They produce sculpture, public art and film installations. Their work is the product of an ongoing conversation concerning the modernity of the mid-century, the production of space and the built environment. Young and Giroux rework modernist forms of abstraction using consumer goods and industrial prototyping methods, construction systems and componentry to produce sculptural objects that partake in contemporary architectural discourse. Their film works constitute a form of research on sculptural form in the built environment from the architectural to the domestic scale. Their work has been shown at Scope Miami Beach (2004), Ace Art Inc (Winnipeg, 2004); the Power Plant (Toronto, 2006); the ExiS festival (Seoul, 2009); and The Museum Fur Kunst and Gewerbe Hamburg (2009). Their film installation 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot has been exhibited at Mercer Union, Toronto (2010), and the Akademie der Kunst through Forum Expanded, of the Berlinale, Berlin (2010), and they are currently featured in a solo show at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. They are represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. Christian teaches at the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.
Sarah Anne Johnson
Sarah Anne Johnson received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 2002, and completed her MFA at the Yale School of the Art in 2004. Johnson’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Grange Prize, granted by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Aeroplan, and a Major Grant from the Manitoba Arts Council. She has received numerous positive reviews in many publications including the New York Times, Village Voice, New York Magazine, Frieze, Modern Painters, Canadian Art, Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Winnipeg Free Press, Art Forum, American Art Magazine, and Art on Paper. Three of her exhibitions were purchased in their entirety by major museums; namely, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and Art Gallery of Ontario. Other institutions who collect her work are the New York Library, the Spencer Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Bank of Montreal. She remains an active presence in Winnipeg where she lives and works. For the last few years and ongoing, she participates in thesis committees at the University of Manitoba and last year she was a mentor for MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Woman’s Art).
Charles Stankievech
Charles Stankievech is an artist who creates ‘fieldworks’ that employ the materiality of the electromagnetic, the vehicle of architecture and the strategy of institutions. Within a conceptual practice he uses the forms of curating, pedagogy and wiring not as supplementary to or as an extension of his art, but as forms of art themselves. His diverse body of work has been shown at such places as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA2010 Germany), Xth Biennale of Architecture (Venice), Eyebeam + ISSUE Project Room (New York), Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida). He has curated such unorthodox exhibitions as Magnetic Norths, A Wake for St. Kippenberger’s MetroNet, and the series OVER THE WIRE with Lawrence Weiner, Gary Hill, Iain Baxter&, SIMPARCH, Centre for Land Use Interpretation and others. His writings have been included in academic journals, such as Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press) and 306090 (Princeton Architectural Press), artist’s catalogues and translated into several languages. Stankievech holds an MFA in Open Media with a thesis on sound and architecture and a previous philosophy thesis on Slavoj Zizek and Frank Kafka. A co-founder of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, Stankievech splits his time between the Yukon and Montreal.
About The Sobey Art Award
The Sobey Art Award, Canada’s pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art, was created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation. It is an annual prize given to an artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated. A total of 70,000 CAD in prize money is awarded annually; 50,000 CAD to the winner and 5,000 CAD to the other four finalists. Since its inception, the Sobey Art Award and accompanying exhibition have been organized and administered by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
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For information:
Bernard Doucet | Director of Development | Art Gallery of Nova Scotia 902 424 0073
www.artgalleryofnovascotia.ca