AIMIA | AGO PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE ANNOUNCES 2016 SHORTLIST

Jury selects four international finalists; public vote for C$50,000 prize begins in Gallery on September 7 

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Four outstanding international artists have been shortlisted for the 2016 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, Canada’s most significant award for photography. Co-presented by Aimia, a Canadian-based global leader in data-driven marketing and loyalty analytics company, and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the Prize awards C$50,000 to one winner, who is chosen by public vote. The four finalists will present their work in an exhibition opening Sept. 7, 2016 at the AGO in Toronto. Voting begins in person at the AGO upon the exhibition’s opening and on the Prize’s website on Sept. 14, 2016.  

The 2016 finalists are:

• Talia Chetrit (USA)
• Jimmy Robert (France)
• Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (Germany)
• Elizabeth Zvonar (Canada)

Fourteen international nominators selected a long list of 23 artists. From that list, a jury of three experts named the four finalists, who each showed extraordinary potential. The jury was headed by Kitty Scott, the AGO’s Carol & Morton Rapp Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and included artist Stan Douglas and art scholar Russell Ferguson. The exhibition will be curated by Adelina Vlas, the AGO’s Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.  

“The four nominated artists for this year’s Aimia | AGO Photography Prize all work with photography in singular ways, each of which embodies a current mode in contemporary art,” Vlas said. “The strength of their work and the diversity of their approaches will make for a unique exhibition inviting visitors to appreciate, reflect on, and participate in the visual culture of our time.”  

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Talia Chetrit

Talia Chetrit was born in Washington, DC in 1982, and lives and works in New York. Chetrit’s work focuses on the human body—often her own—as a starting point to examine how images are constructed to support different agendas and interpretations of reality. After beginning her practice with an exploration of the manipulative nature of photography, Chetrit is increasingly interested in the relationship the camera has with the subject matter it documents. Her work has recently been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Sculpture Center in New York, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Studio Voltaire in London and LACMA in Los Angeles.  

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Jimmy Robert

Jimmy Robert was born in Guadeloupe in 1975 and currently lives and works in Bucharest. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses performance, photography, film, video and drawing. Robert typically uses photography as a starting point for his works on paper, breaking down the divisions between two and three dimensions, as well as image and object. In some works Robert uses found photographs that he tears, collages, tapes and crumples before digitally scanning them and pinning them to the wall. In other works, Robert takes new photographs in his studio and crams them into wooden boxes or arranges them on the gallery floor. His sculptures similarly give the illusion of paper forms and often play with notions of value and durability. Integrated within his photographic and sculpture practice, performance remains a central part of Robert’s work. His dance and performance works also oscillate between image and objecthood as well as the personal and the political.  

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Shulz-Dornburg

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg was born 1938 in Berlin and lives and works in Dusseldorf. Since the end of the 1960s, the house as a fundamental fact of human existence has been central to her work. She has travelled from the secret village of Kurchatov, Kazakhstan to the Hejaz railway in Saudi Arabia, from Kronstadt, Russia to Armenia and the border of Georgia and Azerbaijan to Iraq and Syria, in order to photograph the intertwining relationship between industrial and architectural structures, land and humans. Her work captures the historical and political importance of architecture and its destruction within the last century. Schulz-Dornburg’s work is a critical exploration of the construction of power and its impermanence, and has recently been included in exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and Giorgio Mastinu Gallery in Venice.  

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Elizabeth Zvonar

Elizabeth Zvonar works in a variety of mediums, including collage, sculpture and photography. Her collages are created from a variety of sources, from fashion magazines to art history and science textbooks, they are then scanned and reproduced as glossy photographs while keeping the rips and cuts of the original collage. Zvonar’s images explore the conflicting meanings that exist within Western media, playing with inherent hypocrisies in the media’s depictions of women, consumerism and history. In her sculpture, she uses a variety of materials including porcelain, cement and bronze to cast body parts and pieces of clothing. These body parts are then assembled and re-contextualized with a similarly collage-like approach. The materials and forms suggest luxury objects but the strange juxtapositions are designed to unsettle the viewer and offer alternate possibilities of purpose and interpretation.  

The Aimia | AGO Photography Prize recognizes and develops the best in Canadian and international contemporary photography and helps to foster the next generation of artists.

The Prize has a total annual prize value of C$90,000, and is composed of an annual exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, an online exhibition at AimiaAGOPhotographyPrize.com, a range of public programming and a national scholarship program. It includes awards of $50,000 to the winner, $5,000 to each of the three runners-up, $7,000 to each of three scholarship winners and $1,000 to each of their respective schools. This year, the Prize also expanded to include an award of $1,000 for honorable mention in the scholarship category.

Report courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario.