Canadian Art has been nominated twice for a National Magazine Award this year.
Features from our Fall 2011 issue by Timothy Taylor and Douglas Weber were nominated in an announcement released May 1.
In the Arts & Entertainment category, Timothy Taylor has been nominated for “Man Standing”—his article about Zacharias Kunuk, the internationally known, Cannes-recognized filmmaker who has carried on life in Igloolik, hunting and socializing and raising his family, largely disregarding this global acclaim.
In the Creative Photography category, Donald Weber has been nominated for “Man Standing”’s accompanying photo feature: “Quniqjuk, Qunbuq, Quabaa.” Inspired by the early 20th-century seal-oil-lamp photography of Robert Flaherty (director of Nanook of the North) and by Kunuk’s observation that the North has gone “from the stone age to the digital age in a single generation,” Weber decided to create portraits of Igloolik residents as illuminated by their own mobile phones and other digital devices.
Weber writes in the magazine, “In the Arctic language, there is a word, quniqjuk, which means the indistinct horizon of the unknown future,” and he notes that these digital devices, in many ways, emit “the light of the global future.” He also explains that qunbuq means “the brightness on the horizon that indicates the presence of ice on an ocean,” and that quabaa means travel where you have no real goal in mind, where one seeks to “split things that are frozen together.”
The result is the second major artist project Weber has created for the magazine—his first, Fall 2010’s “Interrogations,” recently won a Silver in Best Portrait Photography from the Art and Design Club of Canada.
The 35th annual National Magazine Awards gala and ceremony will take place on June 7, 2012, at the Carlu in Toronto. From nearly 2,000 individual entries nationwide, the awards’ 228 volunteer judges nominated a total of 362 submissions from 81 different Canadian magazines for awards in 45 written, visual, integrated and special categories.
