Sobey Art Award Exhibition Opens in Alberta for First Time

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An exhibition by the five finalists for the Sobey Art Award is on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton starting Saturday. It's the first time the award exhibition has opened in the West.

The award recognizes the best Canadian artists forty years old and under as selected by an international jury of curators and art gallery directors.

The show, curated by the gallery's Lindsey Sharman, includes 35 works, ranging from video-based installations to paintings sculptures, drawings and photographs.

“The work by this year’s shortlisted artists is incredibly varied and their diverse ways of working makes for a really interesting exhibition,” says Sharman. “There are some crossovers of themes, though there is an attention to language running through the exhibition and there is definitely an interest in looking at colonial structures and colonial legacies.”

The exhibition runs from Oct. 5 to Jan. 5 and is complemented by an artist roundtable on Oct. 4 from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. moderated by 2016 shortlisted nominee, Brenda Draney, followed by an opening party from 7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. A curator's tour will be held on Oct. 26, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.

Catherine Crowston, the gallery's executive director, said it was the first time that the Sobey award has been presented in Alberta.

This year, the Sobey will distribute $240,000 in prize money, including a top prize of $100,000. Each of the four finalists will receive $25,000, and the other longlisted artists will receive $2,000 each. The winner will be announced Nov. 15.

Next year, the exhibition and gala will return to the National Gallery of Canada.

The finalists are from five different regions: 

• Ontario: Stephanie Comilang’s video works follow Paraiso, a Tagalog speaking “drone” who documents Filipino diasporic experiences.
• Quebec: Nicolas Grenier uses painting and the coding of colour to investigate political, economic, cultural and social spaces.
• Prairies and the North: Kablusiak uses humour to cope with cultural displacement and creates a methodology for inventing cultural connections from an urban perspective.
• West Coast and Yukon: Anne Low uses sculpture, installation, textiles and printmaking to investigate how forms can detach from their historical context to speak to contemporary notions of the domestic and the decorative.
• Atlantic: D’Arcy Wilson’s art examines a colonial relationship to the natural world from her perspective as a descendant of European settlers.

For further information, go to gallery.ca/sobey or follow @PrixSobeyAward. 

Source: Art Gallery of Alberta