Clockwise from top left: Canada Council for the Arts in Ottawa. Photo: Kohila Kurunathan.; Janice Kerbel, Remarkable: The Human Fire Fly, 2007. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery. Photo: Dean Tomlinson; Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Now's the Time" (installation view), 2015. Photo: Barbara Solowan.
Our editors’ weekly roundup of Canadian art news.
Toronto-born, London, UK-based artist Janice Kerbel has been nominated for the 2015 Turner Prize. Handed out annually to a British visual artist under the age of 50, the Turner Prize is arguably the art world’s most prestigious award for contemporary art. Kerbel was nominated for her operatic work DOUG, which premiered in Glasgow earlier this month. This marks the second year in a row that a Canadian-born artist has made the Turner Prize shortlist, after Glasgow-based Ciara Phillips’s 2014 nomination.
In anticipation of the June announcement of the Canada Council for the Art’s new funding model, the organization has released a report detailing the role of dialogue with the arts community in the development of the new funding model. The 14-page document underscores the Canada Council’s motivations behind the overhaul, but doesn’t offer any further information on the changes, which were first announced in January.
The Art Gallery of Ontario’s recent retrospective of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat proved exceptionally successful for the institution, with more than 150,000 visitors. This figure place the exhibition, curated by Austrian art historian Dieter Buchhart, in the gallery’s 14 most-visited shows of all time.
Artist Chris Lloyd, a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and former director of the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax, garnered international attention this week for a performance art project that involved running as the federal Conservative party candidate in Montreal’s Papineau riding (also the riding of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau). The veiled hoax comes after Lloyd’s longtime letter-writing project, DEAR PM, which details his one-sided correspondence with Stephen Harper since 2001. Lloyd has since resigned the official nomination as the Conservative candidate.
