The Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak has won the $100,000 Sobey Art Award for excellence in contemporary art in Canada. It was second time lucky for the Yellowknife-born multimedia artist, who was also a finalist in 2019.
The announcement was made Saturday in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada, where, prophetically and cheekily, one of Kablusiak’s pieces showing is a stone carving of a kneeling figure with dollar signs attached. It is entitled TY Again Mr. Sobey.
“Winning this award is a dream, and being among amazing peers makes this award especially special,” Kablusiak said.
The other shortlisted artists – Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Michèle Pearson Clark, Anahita Norouzi, Séamus Gallagher – each receive $25,000. Their work is also part of the Sobey exhibition at the National Gallery.
Kablusiak’s pieces include Red Ookpik, a furry work of dyed sealskin, felt and fibrefill that represents the plush, wide-eyed owl Ookpik, first created by Inuit artist Jeannie Snowball in the early 1960s. Kablusiak’s Surprise Bag/Party City (where you belong) is comprised of soapstone candies, stickers, temporary tattoos, a keychain and an archivally printed bag.
Speaking with Inuit Art Quarterly recently, Kablusiak said, “If I’m going to be sad about colonialism and make art about it, I either want it to be so [absurd] that it sets people off or have it open enough that people can relate to it.”
Nuyaq I and Nuyaq II, 2021, 1: artist’s mother’s hair | hide uppers, artificial sinew + gifted crushed velvet 2: artist’s hair | hide uppers, artificial sinew + gifted crushed velvet 1: 5.5 x 3.25 in 2: 5.5 x 3.25 in.Philip Kanwischer courtesy of Norberg Hall/Handout
According to the Sobey Art Foundation, Kablusiak’s art, though imbued with humour, explores community ties within the Inuit diaspora and the impact of colonization on Inuit expressions of gender and sexuality and on health and well-being.
“The 2023 Sobey Art Award jury felt compelled by Kablusiak’s fearless and unapologetic practice that confounds old categories and art histories and points to new imaginaries,” said the National Gallery’s Jonathan Shaughnessy, jury chair.
The jury, which judged the finalists on their careers to date, was comprised of Matthew Hyland, Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery; Haema Sivanesan, Alberta’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Wanda Nanibush, Art Gallery of Ontario, Eve-Lyne Beaudry, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Pamela Edmonds, Dalhousie Art Gallery; and Cecilia Alemani, New York’s High Line Art.
Red Ookpik, 2020, Dyed seal skin, felt, fibre fill, embroidery floss, leather, 6.5 x 3.75 x 3.75 in.Philip Kanwischer courtesy of Norberg Hall/Handout
The Sobey Art Award is among the richest visual arts prizes in the world and one of the most generous cultural prizes in Canada. It was originally set up in 2001 to honour and encourage up-and-coming artists under the age of 40 whose work had been shown in Canadian galleries. In 2021, the age limit was removed.
Kablusiak’s work is found in the collections of the Indigenous Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery, the Image Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The Sobey Art Award exhibition continues at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa until March 3, 2024.
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.
