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"Lake"
Erin Shirreff, "Lake," 2012, still of colour video, silent, 44 min. loop.
2 of 2
"Lake"
Erin Shirreff, "Lake," 2012, still of colour video, silent, 44 min. loop.
Erin Shirreff wins major photography prize for meditative work
Erin Shirreff has won a prestigious international art award, the $50,000 Aimia-AGO Photography Prize, for meditative work that reflects on memory and the history of the image.
Shirreff, who grew up in Kelowna, B.C., and has work in the collections of New York’s Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums, bridges the space between video and photography to raise questions about how time and space are represented visually.
“The works I was submitting are very long, slow videos,” she told the Kelowna Courier. “There’s not a lot going on in them. You have to spend time to watch them.”
For instance, Lake features an image of the Okanagan Valley near Kelowna that she found in a tourist brochure from the 1980s and edited to reflect representational styles from different eras. The piece, shown in her 2013 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, collapses time and place as it fluctuates between natural and artificial effects, stillness and motion.
Shirreff, now based in New York, was selected by the public. Some 25,000 votes were cast during a 10-week voting period, both online and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where work by the four finalists was exhibited. They were selected from a worldwide long list developed by a panel of experts. One of the finalists must be from Canada.
Runners-up: Edgardo Aragón (Mexico), LaToya Ruby Frazier (United States), and Chino Otsuka (Japan/Britain), each received $5,000. Their topics varied. Frazier, for instance, documented the social decay of her hometown of Braddock, Penn., a former steel town, while Aragon considered the violence of Mexico’s drug wars. All four finalists receive eight-week residencies in Canada, starting early this year.
Previous winners of the award, formerly known as the Grange Prize, include Jo Longhurst of Britain, Gauri Gill of India, Ontario artist Kristan Horton, Marco Antonio Cruz of Mexico, and Winnipeg artist Sarah Anne Johnson.
