A still from Matthew Rankin's film Tabula Rasa, an absurd, phantasmagorical recounting of the Winnipeg floods of 1950. Photo: YouTube.
Matthew Rankin, a filmmaker with ties to Winnipeg and Montreal, has won the inaugural National Media Arts Prize. The prize win was announced last night in Halifax as part of the Independent Media Arts Alliance‘s national summit.
Rankin earns $5,000 with the prize, which was created by the IMAA to honour a mid-career Canadian media artist who is making an exceptional contribution to the sector.
This year’s shortlist, broken down mostly by region, included interdisciplinary artist Amanda Dawn Christie (Atlantic), installation artist Jonathan Villeneuve (Quebec), filmmaker and video artist Deirdre Logue (Ontario), multimedia artist and cultural theorist Jackson 2bears (Pacific), and new-media pioneer Skawennati (National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition).
Matthew Rankin studied Quebec history at McGill University and at Université Laval before returning to Winnipeg to become a maker of films. More recently, he has been based in Montreal. He works in hybrids of documentary, experimental drama and animated abstraction, with films including Tabula Rasa (an absurd recounting of the Winnipeg floods of 1950, set in St-Boniface), Negativipeg (described as “a grunge-core documentary about Rory Lepine’s fateful 1985 encounter with Guess Who frontman Burton Cummings in a Winnipeg 7-Eleven”) and Cattle Call (co-created with Mike Maryniuk as an animated interpretation of a Winnipeg cattle auction). Rankin’s films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW and Toronto International Film Festival, and in 2013 he was an artist-in-residence at the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire. He has also been nominated for a Jutra Award.
As Rankin states on the IMAA website, “The raw material of all of my work is history. My projects start with some narrative fragment of the past and then telescope into its abstract, molecular core. I am drawn to moments of transcendence in history, when you see a thing expanding and moving beyond itself to become absurd, abstract, ecstatic. My work seeks that cosmic, transformative moment in which irony becomes earnest, when tragedy becomes hilarious and when failure becomes sublime.”
The Independent Media Arts Alliance, which created and administers the prize, is a member-driven non-profit national organization working to advance and strengthen the media arts community in Canada. It represents more than 90 organizations and serves more than 16,000 cultural workers.
