New Generation Photography Award
The New Generation Photography Award recognizes the practices of some of Canada’s most promising lens-based artists.
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada, supported by the Scotiabank Photography Program.
This year’s exhibition showcases thought-provoking works by the winners from both 2020 and 2021: Noah Friebel, Curtiss Randolph and Katherine Takpannie (2020) and Dustin Brons, Chris Donovan and Dainesha Nugent-Palache (2021).
Reflecting the expressive power of photography, the images in this exhibition provide a compelling overview of this moment in time. Whether exploring the impact of industry and poverty, issues affecting Black and Indigenous Peoples, the built and natural world, or the minutiae of everyday life, each photographer has also used the medium as a conceptual tool, encouraging viewer engagement with the preoccupations of today’s world.
Date
Location
Artwork
Katherine Takpannie, Our Women and Girls are Sacred # 3, 2016. Inkjet print, 91 x 137 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2022 (2022.0305.3). © Katherine Takpannie. Photo: courtesy the artist
Katherine Takpannie, Our Women and Girls are Sacred # 3, 2016. Inkjet print, 91 x 137 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2022 (2022.0305.3). © Katherine Takpannie. Photo: courtesy the artist
Dainesha Nugent-Palache, Red Earth of St. Elizabeth (What Brought Us Here), 2019, inkjet print. Collection of the artist. © Dainesha Nugent-Palache
Dainesha Nugent-Palache, Red Earth of St. Elizabeth (What Brought Us Here), 2019, inkjet print. Collection of the artist. © Dainesha Nugent-Palache
Chris Donovan, Boy in Window, 2017, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist. © Chris Donovan
Chris Donovan, Boy in Window, 2017, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist. © Chris Donovan
Dustin Brons, Non-Circulating, 2019, inkjet print. Collection of the artist. © Dustin Brons
Dustin Brons, Non-Circulating, 2019, inkjet print. Collection of the artist. © Dustin Brons
Curtiss Randolph, Retiree Soirée, 2019, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist. © Curtiss Randolph
Curtiss Randolph, Retiree Soirée, 2019, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist. © Curtiss Randolph
Noah Friebel, Enclosure, 2020, gelatin silver print, steel, LCD display and media player. Collection of the artist. © Noah Friebel
Noah Friebel, Enclosure, 2020, gelatin silver print, steel, LCD display and media player. Collection of the artist. © Noah Friebel
2021 WINNERS
2021 NGPA winners take you on a tour of their work in the New Generation Photography Award Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.
Dustin Bron
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.
Chris Donovan
Chris Donovan is a lens-based artist based between Toronto and New Brunswick. Hailing from the industrial city of Saint John, his practice focuses on the intersection of community and industry. His work has been awarded by Pictures of the Year International (U of Missouri), Alexia Foundation (Syracuse University), the New Brunswick Arts Board, Toronto Arts Council, and exhibited across Canada at photography festivals including CONTACT (Toronto), Capture (Vancouver), Exposure (Calgary), Flash (Winnipeg), and Zoom (Saguenay). He is a member of Boreal collective and is currently pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University as a Graduate Fellow.
Dainesha Nugent-Palache
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.
2020 WINNERS
2020 NGPA winners take you on a tour of their work in the New Generation Photography Award Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.
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.
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.
Photo: Fred Cattroll
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.
Photo: John Wragg
Watch the recording of the Zoom talk with the 2020 New Generation Photography Award winning artists Noah Friebel, Curtiss Randolph, and Katherine Takpannie.
FEATURED
VIDEO
Discover the work of the 2020 and 2021 New Generation Photography Award winners, in this conversation between themselves and senior curator of photographs, Andrea Kunard.
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