Colin Miner, still from fog/mist (lava ice cave, fall 2012), 2013. Courtesy the artist.
Ontario-based photographer Colin Miner is the winner of the most recent Barbara Spohr Memorial Award, announced by the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. The award includes a $6,000 prize, as well as a residency at the Banff Centre.
Miner’s work draws attention to photography’s relationship to the scientific, as well as to the materiality of photographs.
Miner was born in Halifax, and has previously resided in Vancouver and Beijing. Since completing a BFA and MFA at the University of British Columbia, he is in the final stages of a PhD in visual arts and culture at Western University. He is a participant in the artist research group Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds, which engages water as culture and resource through contemporary art. (This group will be a focus of an exhibition at Rodman Hall Art Centre in St. Catharines starting on May 23.)
This biannual award honours Barbara Spohr, who was both a program participant and photo staff member at the Banff Centre before dying in 1987, at the age of 32, due to cancer. The Barbara Spohr Memorial Award is intended to encourage the development of Canadian contemporary photography by providing financial and creative assistance to an artist whose work has made a significant contribution to the field.
The award is open to all artists who work with photography and have been enrolled in a visual arts residency program at the Banff Centre in the two years preceding the award application deadline.
Previous recipients of the award include Maegan Hill-Carroll and Celia Perrin Sidarous.
