2022 Winners of New Generation Photography Award
From left to right: Séamus Gallagher of Halifax, NS, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes of Vancouver, BC, and Clara Lacasse of Montreal, QC
winners of the 2022 New Generation Photography Award. (photo credits in order of presentation: courtesy the artist; Ali Bosley; Manolis Daris)
Vancouver artist Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes is one of three winners of the 2022 New Generation Photography Award. The other winners are Séamus Gallagher, of Halifax, and Clara Lacasse, of Montreal. Each winner receives $1,000.
The award was launched in 2017 by the National Gallery of Canada, in partnership with Scotiabank, to support Canadian artists aged 35 and under.
Their work will be on view at the Contact Photo Festival in Toronto after May 1 and will also be featured in an exhibition this fall at the National Gallery. Both shows will be curated by Andrea Kunard, the gallery's senior curator of photographs.
Kunard chaired a jury composed of Vancouver-based Stephen Waddell, the 2019 winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award; Toronto's Dainesha Nugent-Palache, 2021 winner of the New Generation Photography Award; and Montreal artist Isabelle Hayeur.
The jury selected the winners from a long list that also included nine other lens-based artists – Jorian Charlton, Matt Horseman, Zainab Hussain, Tanea Hynes, Alvin Luong, Farihah Shah, Eve Tagny, Louie Villanueva and Shellie Zhang.
Kunard noted the sophistication, thoughtfulness and curiosity with which the winners probe shared anxieties about identity, culture and the environment using photography's capacity to both reveal and conceal.
"Works tease at the boundaries of authenticity and artifice, desire and actuality, the natural and constructed," says Kunard. "Artists celebrate visual excess with an eye to questioning what such abundance communicates."
Holmes, who studied photography at Emily Carr University, won the 2017 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize from the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver.
Séamus Gallagher is a non-binary photo and new media artist, who graduated from NSCAD University in Halifax. They have shown across Canada, as well as in Germany, England, Switzerland and Los Angeles.
Clara Lacasse, a graduate of Concordia University in Montreal, is inspired by the construction of narratives related to history, nature, science and the collective imagination.
Source: National Gallery of Canada
