The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Sobey Art Foundation today announced the five artists who have been shortlisted for the 2013 Sobey Art Award, the pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian Art.
The 2013 Short List
• West Coast and the Yukon: Isabelle Pauwels
• Prairies and the North: Mark Clintberg
• Ontario: Duane Linklater
• Quebec: Pascal Grandmaison
• Atlantic: Tamara Henderson
"The Curatorial Panel is pleased to announce the 2013 Sobey Art Award national shortlist. The excellent pool, from which 25 nominees emerged, reinforced our collective commitment to supporting Canadian contemporary art. The five selected artists were chosen due to their extraordinary and rigorous practice, which further engages an international contemporary art discourse. Each artist demonstrates a distinct style and approach to film making, video, performance, the public realm and collaboration, where spectral and imaginative concepts are contrasted with the tangible everyday environment."
The Sobey Art Award has a prize value of $70,000 with $50,000 going to the winner and $5,000 awarded to each of the other finalists. The Sobey Art Award, established in 2002 is awarded to a Canadian artist age 40 and under who has exhibited in a public or commercial gallery within 18 months of being nominated. It was conceived to further the national conversation about contemporary art and is widely recognized as the pre-eminent award for contemporary art in Canada.
Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) opening on September 13, 2013. The winner will be announced at a Gala event at the AGNS on October 9, 2013.
The 2013 Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel consists of:
• Mireille Eagan, Curator of Canadian Art, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery;
• Marie-Claude Landry, Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d'art de Joliette;
• Melissa Bennett, Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton;
• Jesse McKee, Curator, Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre;
• Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery.
About the Nominees
Isabelle Pauwels
Born in Kortrijk, Belgium, Isabelle Pauwels lives and works in New Westminster, BC. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. While her practice has encompassed sculpture, artist books, and prints, her primary medium is video. Featuring an intensive exploration of staging, shooting, and most notably editing, her video installations reconfigure popular genres such as the sitcom, the home movie, or the documentary. Pauwels' blend of performance and documentary realism highlights the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. Her research interests include television history, narratives of colonial exploration, and reality TV culture. Recently, she exhibited at Volker Bradke in Dusseldorf, Western Front in Vancouver, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver.
Mark Clintberg
Mark Clintberg is an artist, writer, and curator from Alberta currently studying in Montreal. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University where he is also a Part-time Faculty Member. He earned his M.A. at Concordia University in 2008, and his B.F.A. from the Alberta College of Art & Design in 2001, completing a portion of his studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. In 2010 he conducted research at Oxford University with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Public and private collections across Canada and in the United States, including the National Gallery of Canada, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts have acquired his work. In the last year he has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary, and Trap\door in Lethbridge. His work has also been shown at the Miami based Locust Projects, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, The Banff Centre, Centre des arts actuels Skol in Montreal, The Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, and Eastern Edge in St. John's. Journals and periodicals that have published his writing include The Art Newspaper, The Senses & Society, C magazine, ETC., BlackFlash, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, the Fillip Review, Photofile, Arte al Dia International, and Art.es Magazine. For the Spring and Summer of 2013 he will be an artist in residence on Fogo Island, Newfoundland. In late Summer 2013 he will launch a new commissioned project at Western Front in Vancouver.
Duane Linklater
Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He was educated at the University of Alberta, receiving a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Linklater attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, completing his Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video. Linklater produces a range of work including video and film installation, performance, sculptural objects, and often works within the contexts of cooperative and collaborative gestures. He has exhibited and screened his work nationally and internationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta, Family Business Gallery in New York, at the Power Plant in Toronto, and the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. His collaborative film project with Brian Jungen, Modest Livelihood, was originally presented at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre in collaboration with dOCUMENTA (13) which subsequently travelled to the Reva and David Logan Centre Gallery at the University of Chicago and will show at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver in summer 2013. Linklater will also be presenting new works at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto in June of 2013 in a solo exhibition organized by Althea Thauberger.
Pascal Grandmaison
Pascal Grandmaison, born in 1975, lives and works in Montréal. He holds a degree in visual art from UQAM in Montréal. He is known for the contemplative themes of his large-scale photographs and works in film and video. His diverse subjects range from pensive portrait images to deep meditations on the legacies of modernist architecture, capturing a psychological complexity through a minimal and detached view. Grandmaison has exhibited extensively in Canada and Europe. He had numerous solos shows at Galerie René Blouin in Montréal, Jessica Bradley Art + Projects in Toronto, Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Galerie Georges Verney-Carron and Galerie BF 15 in Lyon, France, Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Galerie B-312 and Espace Vox in Montréal. In 2006, his solo exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal toured to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been included in group exhibitions at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Vancouver Art Gallery, Edmonton Art Gallery, Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art in Toronto, Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain in Luxembourg, as well as the Prague Bienniale in 2005. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Galerie René Blouin in Montréal.
Tamara Henderson
Tamara Henderson is from Sackville New Brunswick. She studied at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and holds a Masters Degree from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, Sweden. Henderson has participated in residencies at The Paul Klee Center: Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming, The Banff Center: Life is Beautiful and the CCA Kitakyushu. She has exhibited in Kassel at dOCUMENTA (13), Western Front in Vancouver, Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Kunstverein Nürnberg and Walter Philips Gallery in Banff, additionally she has given lectures at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and at the University of Washington in Seattle. Henderson's practice is based on recordings of the unconscious that follow an oneiric, or dreamlike structure. Drawn from processes of hypnosis, nocturnal fieldwork and altered states, Henderson's experiences are manifested into sculpture, furniture, film-sets and 16mm films. Possessing spectral qualities, the forms speak to the absence of a conscious experience.
