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Sobey Art Award 2020 – Prairies and North
Photo: Pati Tyrell
Asinnajaq
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Asinnajaq is a visual artist, writer, and curator from Inukjuak, Nunavik, and currently lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). She wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary, which was included in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s landmark show INSURGENCE/RESURGENCE, and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award.
Asinnajaq has exhibited internationally in ‘O le ūa na fua mai Manuʻa in Australia, and here in Toronto in Among All These Tundras. She was an editor of SPACETIME, the Spring 2019 issue of Canadian Art. She is a co-creator of the Tillutarniit Inuit Film Festival, and co-curated Isuma’s show at the 58th Venice Biennale. Asinnajaq’s performance video Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition) (2018) is currently touring galleries and film festivals around the world.
Assinijaq is the recipient of several awards, notably the International Indigenous Award at the Wairoa Maori Film Festival in New Zealand, and Best International Indigenous Short Film at the Skabmagovat Film Festival in Finland.
Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition), 2018, video still. Courtesy of the artist
Blue Hearted Woman, from LP series, 2018 – ongoing, digital drawing and photo. Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Justin Waddell
Jason de Haan
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Jason de Haan lives and works in Southern Alberta, traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Working responsively, based on encountered conditions, his projects explore resonance, broadcast, unseen forces, concentration, residuals, synchronicity and activation.
De Haan has a diverse practice, with a wide and increasingly multidisciplinary approach to sculpture, collage, drawing, photography, video, text, and book works. Starting points emerge from an interest in, and fascination with, mythology, magic, science fiction, geology, and geographical sites of invisible forces and powerful histories. Densely symbolic and complex, his narratives are open-ended and ongoing propositions to be experimented with and altered.
Recent exhibitions include the Sequences Festival (Reykjavik) Museo de la Ciudad (Mexico), Esker Foundation (Calgary), De Fabriek (Netherlands), Charles H. Scott Gallery (Vancouver), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), and MASS MoCA (Massachusetts). De Haan received an M.F.A. from Bard College, New York in 2015, and is represented in Canada by Clint Roenisch Gallery.
Structure for Observing Atypical Flight, 2018, steel, found glass bottles, copper, paint. 6.1 x 6.1 x 4.2 metres, variable. Courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery. Installation view at the exhibition Eth Yrtannry Fo Istdance at Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
Goost Juice (left) and Lithopedian Dreaming (right), 2020, collage, 61 x 70.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery. Installation view at the exhibition Swamp Watch at Museo de la Ciudad, Queretaro, Mexico.
Photo: Imaobong Udofa
Luther Konadu
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Luther Konadu is an emerging artist and writer based in Winnipeg. He manages Public Parking, an online publication highlighting and documenting the conversations emerging creators and thinkers are having through their practices. He was a frequent contributor to Akimbo Blog, writer-in-residence at Gallery 44, and has written for Canadian Art.
His studio work involves photography, but branches out to include sculptural components. His photographic work is a continuous documentary project, centring on how objective visual documentation ostensibly formulates public perceptions surrounding collective identities and the historical record.
He was a finalist for the 2019 New Generation Photography Award, and has recently exhibited work at New York’s Aperture Foundation. His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, on CNN.com, and in Border Crossings. In 2020, he will be part of a group exhibition at Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, and Berlin Photo Week.
Figure as Index, 2018, c-print, 59.7 x 81.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Figure as Index, 2019, c-print (triptych), 187.9 x 81.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Jordan Bennett
Amy Malbeuf
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Amy Malbeuf is a Métis visual artist from Rich Lake, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory, who lives and works on unceded Mi’kmaq territory in Terence Bay, Nova Scotia. Through animal-hair tufting, beadwork, installation, and performance, Malbeuf explores notions of identity, place, language, and ecology.
Malbeuf’s contributions develop complex discussions regarding Métis art and, more broadly, contemporary art as a woman of Cree and Metis ancestry. She is also a founding member of the Earthline Tattoo Collective, a group of Indigenous artists who seek to rekindle and expand traditional and cultural Indigenous tattooing practices.
Her work is found in public and private collections, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally in more than forty shows at venues including the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe), and Pataka Art + Museum (New Zealand). She has an M.F.A. in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
A Woman and This Bannock That She Made For You, 2015. Performance with 363 kg of sugar and six loaves of bannock, at Plain Red Art Gallery, First Nations University, Regina. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Eagleclaw Thom
Cream and Sugar (detail), 2017, caribou hair tufting on inherited china and shelf, 76.2 x 15.2 x 15.2 cm. Collection of Indigenous Art Centre, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, Gatineau, Quebec. Photo: Amy Malbeuf
Photo: York University
Freya Björg Olafson
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Freya Björg Olafson works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, AR/VR, painting, and performance. Her practice engages with identity and the body, as informed by technology and the Internet.
Exploring ideas of embodiment, technology, alienation, communication, neoliberalism, she works with themes that are significant to an understanding of concepts related to identity in the 21st century. Through exhibitions of video art, installations and large-scale performance, Olafson pushes boundaries by subverting technology, and questions humankind’s interactions with media and the making of media art.
Olafson’s work has been presented internationally at the Bauhaus-Archiv (Berlin), Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), Ludwig Museum (Budapest), and nationally at National Arts Centre (Ottawa). Olafson has benefitted from residencies, most notably through the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (New York), OBORO (Montreal), and CounterPulse (San Francisco). Olafson has an M.F.A. in New Media from the Transart Institute (Austria).
Painting with the Man, 2017, still from HD video motion capture, Machinima. Courtesy of the artist.
MÆ — Motion Aftereffect, 2019, performance, live and pre-recorded video, VR and video still. Courtesy of the artist.