Rebecca Belmore, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother 1991–96/2008 Courtesy Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre / photo Sarah Ciurysek (Image 1/24)
The first female First Nations artist to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, a sound artist and composer who has turned public spaces into instruments, and a member of the groundbreaking Automatiste abstract-painting movement are among the recipients of $25,000 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts this year.
The 2013 winners were announced today at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal. They are:
• Marcel Barbeau, Montreal: A member of the Automatiste movement in Quebec during the 1940s and 1950s, and a student of Paul-Émile Borduas, Barbeau helped bring innovative new forms of abstract painting to the world. His work—which also includes sculpture—is to be included starting March 16 in the Guggenheim Bilbao presentation of “L’art en guerre. France 1938–1947: From Picasso to Dubuffet.”
• Rebecca Belmore, recently relocated from Vancouver to Winnipeg: Known for her powerful works in sculpture, performance, photography and film—including a massive megaphone that travelled from coast to coast—this Anishinaabe artist was, in 2005, the first female First Nations artist to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. She is currently featured in MASS MoCA’s “Oh, Canada” exhibition until April 8.
• Gordon Monahan, Meaford and Berlin: As a sound artist, composer and media artist, Monahan has changed the way many regard possible combinations of the aural and the visual. He has slung piano wire around Toronto’s Massey Hall; co-founded (with partner Laura Kikauka) experimental music clubs and festivals like Electric Eclectics; and created performances where speakers are swung on long cords around actors’ heads. His work is currently featured in a travelling retrospective titled “Seeing Sound” at venues across Canada.
• Colette Whiten, Toronto/Haliburton: Since the early 1970s, Whiten’s sculpture and installation work has developed fresh and timely ways of exploring the connection between the body, the feminine, and its representation in art and mass media. Her work has included full-body casts; a public sculpture for the Calgary Olympics in which life-sized figures hold up a bronze archway; and embroidered and beaded works that reproduce newspaper headlines as well as portraits. In 2007, she was one of only three Canadians to be included in the internationally recognized exhibition “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.”
• Greg Payce, Calgary (Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts): For several decades, Payce’s ceramic sculptures have surprised and delighted viewers. His best-known works include tall rows of vases that “contain” human-figure outlines in the negative spaces between each vase. In recent years, he has combined ceramics with video and photography. He had a solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum last year and was recently featured in “Trans-Ceramics,” the feature exhibition at the 3rd World Biennial of Ceramics in Icheon, Korea.
• William D. MacGillivray, Rose Bay: A founding member of the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-operative in Halifax, MacGillivray has created memorable works for film and television. These range from Gullage’s, a series about a Newfoundland taxi company, to The Man of a Thousand Songs, a documentary about author Alistair MacLeod that won the Audience, Best Director and the Best Documentary Awards at the 2011 Atlantic Film Festival. His latest film, Hard Drive, will be released this year.
• Chantal Pontbriand, Montreal and Paris (Outstanding contribution award): Working as a curator and art critic, Pontbriand has grown the reputation of Canadian art and criticism internationally. In the 1970s, she co-founded Parachute, a cutting-edge magazine that investigated contemporary issues of difference, diversity and globalization in an art context. Pontbriand recently held the position of head of exhibition research and development at Tate Modern and in 2012 was invited to teach at the Sorbonne. An anthology of her texts from 2000 to 2010, Contemporaneity, Art and the Common, will be published in 2013 by Sternberg Press.
“The 2013 laureates embody Canadian art at its best,” said Robert Sirman, director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, in a release. “Not only are they expanding the boundaries of their art forms and addressing the big questions of our time, their work creates new shapes, sounds and perspectives that change the way we perceive the world around us.”
The National Gallery of Canada will hold an exhibition of works by the 2013 GG winners from March 22 to June 23. In addition to the exhibition, the National Gallery will hold screenings of William MacGillivray’s work throughout the month of April.
The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, now in their 14th year, recognize “distinguished career achievements in the visual and media arts by Canadian artists, as well as outstanding contributions through voluntarism, philanthropy, board governance, community outreach or professional activities.”
This year’s independent peer assessment committee for the awards consisted of Marlene Creates, Kenneth Gregory, Mary Longman, Annette Mangaard, Jana Sterbak and Ian Wallace. The peer assessment committee members for the Saidye Bronfman Award were Chantal Gilbert, Harland House and Jane Kidd.
