Five artists, representing that number of regions of Canada, are now in contention for one of the most prestigious art prizes in the country.
The Nova Scotia-based Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada announced the five nominees for the 2023 Sobey Art Award on Wednesday. The shortlisted artists will vie for a first prize of $100,000, to be awarded in November at the NGC in Ottawa.
“The breadth of practices this year represents the multi-faceted texture and strength of contemporary artistic talent in this country,” said Jonathan Shaughnessy, NGC’s director of curatorial initiatives and chair of the Sobey Award jury. “The work of the five finalists present views on many urgent matters of our time, including 2SLGBTQ+ solidarities and representation, as well as critical questions regarding diasporic experience and Canadian identity.”
From east to west, the nominees are as follows:
From Moncton and currently living in Halifax, Seamus Gallagher is a lens-based artist who infuses queer aesthetics with self-portraiture. Outside of photography and video, the graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and recipient of the 2022 Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award generally works with a video-game engine to create virtual reality art projects.
Montreal-based Anahita Norouzi is a research-driven multidisciplinary artist whose practice is inspired by marginalized histories, botanical explorations and archeological excavations. The Tehran native and Concordia University graduate regularly travels between Iran and Canada to conduct her research.
Michèle Pearson Clarke is a former photo laureate of Toronto whose work often focuses on Black and queer experiences of longing and loss. Born in Trinidad, she holds a master of social work from the University of Toronto and is assistant professor of photography at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Representing the Prairies and the North, Inuvialuk artist and curator Kablusiak creates work in a variety of mediums, including, but not limited to, lingerie, flour, soapstone, bed sheets and acrylic paint. The work from the Yellowknife-born, Calgary-based artist explores the Inuit diaspora and the effects of colonization on Inuit gender and sexuality expressions.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Métis artist and writer whose sculptural practice explores the history of found materials and challenges the notion of the city as a settled place. Exploring the concepts of land, property and economy, she incorporates such detritus as beer-can tabs, dollar-store lockets and dandelions into sculptures and works on paper she calls “spells.” The artist was born in Comox, B.C., and lives in Vancouver.
Created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation, the juried prize is awarded annually to an artist who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated, and who first landed on a long list of 25 nominees announced in April.
While the winner takes home $100,000, each runner-up will receive $25,000; each of the other 20 longlisted artists will be awarded $10,000. The NGC’s exhibition of works by the five finalists opens Oct. 13 and runs through March 3, 2024.
Winnipeg’s Divya Mehra won the Sobey in 2022. Her work, which often uses whimsy to comment on colonial cultural relationships, includes the Taj Mahal imagined as a bouncy castle.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
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