An installation view of pigment prints from Jessica Eaton’s 2018 solo show “Iterations (I)” at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal.
The 2019 Guggenheim Fellows were revealed this morning, and as is increasingly the case, there are some Canadian artists on the list.
Montreal in particular is well represented this year: the 2019 fellows include photojournalist Barbara Davidson, who counts Montreal as her hometown; photo-based artist Jessica Eaton, who is currently working in Montreal; and painter-sculptor Fabienne Lasserre, who was educated at Concordia University.
Barbara Davidson, who studied photography and film studies at Concordia University before moving to the United States and working at the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, and the Washington Times, is a three-time Pulitzer and Emmy-award winner. Her best known work focuses on forgotten victims of violence in inner-city Los Angeles.
Jessica Eaton was born in Regina, studied at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, and has been based in Montreal for many years. She has previously been a recipient of the Hyères Photography Jury Grand Prize, and been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award and the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize. She is known for abstract photographs created largely in-camera that challenge human perception and Modernist legacies. She is represented by Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal, as well as Higher Pictures in New York and M+B in Los Angeles.
Fabienne Lasserre was born in Ottawa, and she trained at Concordia University and Columbia University; she is now based in Brooklyn. In 2017, she received the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in New Hampshire. She is known for making abstract, free-standing, double-sided paintings. “I can also describe them as 2-dimensional sculptures,” Lasserre says on the Guggenheim Foundation website. “This blurring of formal categories carries with it the promise of a related ‘blur’ between other ontological classes and rigid models of understanding. … Inviting or obstructing passage and sight, the pieces include ‘what they are not’: the area around them, the people looking at them, the other pieces in the room.” She is represented by Parisian Laundry in Montreal.
In all, 168 new Guggenheim Fellows were named this morning. They were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. Since its establishment in 1925, the foundation has granted more than $360 million in fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals.
Past Canadian recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowships include Deanna Bowen, Kim Adams and Scott Conarroe, among others.
