New Generation Photography Award

Dustin Brons
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Dustin Brons is an artist in Vancouver. He holds an MFA from UC San Diego, a BFA from UBC, and recently participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He works with the recontextualization of existing materials across photographs, videos, and text. His work incorporates visual forms from Western art history as tools to process contemporary sources. Still life and landscape painting, gestural abstraction, linguistic conceptualism, and photographic devices from pictorialism to appropriation are re-configured in representations of climate-change and gentrification, emphasizing the ways that visual forms contribute to shaping social and political understandings of these intangible yet totalizing processes.

Photo:  Dustin Brons

Dustin Brons, AC, 2019, inkjet print. Collection of the artist. © Dustin Brons

Dustin Brons, Demand/Demands, 2019, offset printed poster. Collection of the artist. © Dustin Brons

Dainesha Nugent-Palache
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Through performative video works and photographs, Toronto-based artist Dainesha Nugent-Palache has participated in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. A founding member of the plumb, an ad hoc collective of artists, writers and curators and art venue in Toronto. She has also curated for the feminist music festival and concert series Venus Fest, and Blindspots, an art exhibition and film screening where queer artists explore LGBTQ experience through a diasporic lens. Graduate and recipient of major awards, her artwork is found in The Wedge Collection, Toronto Dominion Bank Art Collection and private collections. Her experiences as an artist have also been spotlighted in the CBC COVID residencies series.

Photo: Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Dainesha Nugent-Palache, A House Standing Where It Should Have Fallen. 2019, inkjet print. Private Collections. © Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Dainesha Nugent-Palache, Angaer, 2016, inkjet print. The Wedge Collection, Private collections. © Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Dainesha Nugent-Palache, Angaer, 2016, inkjet print. The Wedge Collection, Private collections. © Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Conversation with the 2021 and 2020 Winners

Noah Friebel 

Vancouver based Noah Friebel focuses on the fabricated aspect of the photograph, using elements of sculpture and installation to examine our relationship to images, each other, and the narrowing space in between. Since graduating from Emily Carr University with a BFA in 2018, Friebel has been part of several group shows: notably Green Glass Door at Trapp Projects and The Lind Prize 2018 at Polygon Gallery. He had a solo show at Republic Gallery in April 2020.

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Photo: John Wragg

Curtiss Randolph

Toronto born Curtiss Randolph constructs scenes as either tableau or staged documentary narratives. Having grown up in a theatre family, the elements of stage production crept into his working process at an early stage. Mixing realism, surrealism, and gonzo journalism, Randolph challenges viewers’ preconceived notion of documentary style as a way to question ideas of fact and fiction in the photographic medium. Semi-autobiographical storytelling has taken the lead role in Curtiss' work. Artist's such as Moya Garrison, Stan Douglas, Park Chan-wook, and Jim Jarmusch all offer inspiration for Curtiss' creative process.

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Photo: Brendan Gore

Katherine Takpannie is an Ottawa based Inuk artist, writer and graduate of the Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS) program. Her photographs set performative and political gestures against both natural and built environments, including intimate portraits of women. Her work is held in the City of Ottawa’s art collection and has appeared in Getting Under Our Skin exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph and They Forgot We Were Seeds exhibition at the Carleton University Art Gallery.

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Photo: Fred Cattroll