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Sobey Art Award – Prairies and North
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory
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Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory is a kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) performance artist, poet, actor, storyteller and writer based in Iqaluit, Nunavut. She is known for performing uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance that involves storytelling centred around three elements: fear, humour and sexuality.
Laakkuluk describes uaajeerneq as both a political and cultural act, and an idiosyncratic art form.
Alana Bartol
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Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Her site-responsive works explore divination as a way to question consumption-driven relationships to land, water and natural resources. Her recent work examines the past, present, and future of coal mining in what is now known as Alberta.
In 2019, she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award, representing the Prairies & North region. Of English, Irish, French, Scottish, German, and Danish ancestry, Bartol is a white settler currently living in Treaty 7 territory in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), where she teaches at Alberta University of the Arts.
Rotten Pot, 2021, copper cauldron, wooden stands, rocks, coal, QR codes, dried plants (wormwood, tansy, mullein, Canadian thistle, and sweetclover), dimensions variable. Installation view from Processes of Remediation: art, relationships, nature, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2020–21. © Alana Bartol — Courtesy of the artist. Photo: blkarts.ca
Maureen Gruben
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Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben explores intimate materiality as she disassembles and re-combines disparate organic and industrial elements. Polar bear fur, beluga intestines, and sealskins encounter resins, vinyl, and bubble wrap, forging critical links between life in the Western Arctic and global environmental and cultural concerns.
Gruben holds a B.F.A. from the University of Victoria. She has exhibited regularly across Canada and internationally, and her work can be found in major public and private collections. Born and raised in Tuktoyaktuk, she has an implicit knowledge of Arctic land, and the rich but increasingly precarious resources it offers for both survival and creation.
Moving with joy across the ice as my face turns brown from the sun, Formation 1, 2019, inkjet print on hot press paper, 3.05 × 1.08 m. © Maureen Gruben — Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Kyra Kordoski
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Aidainnaqduammi, Morning, 2020, inkjet print on photo rag paper, 81.28 × 121.92 cm. © Maureen Gruben — Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Kyra Kordoski
Andrea Oliver Roberts
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Andrea Oliver Roberts is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist known for sculptural installations and sound works that contend with loss, technology, gender, and language within capitalism. Roberts has shown at galleries internationally, with recent presentations at the Plug In ICA STAGES Biennial, TRUCK Contemporary Art, and The Auxiliary in the U.K.
A recipient of multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council, Roberts composes and performs the solo experimental sound project under the name VOR, and holds an M.F.A. in Sculpture from California College of the Arts, and an Honours B.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Manitoba.
Nic Wilson
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Nic Wilson (he/they) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory now known as Fredericton, New Brunswick. He graduated with a B.F.A. from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an M.F.A. from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory, in 2019, where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow.
Nic’s work often engages time, queer lineage, decay, and the distance between art practice and literature. Their writing has appeared in publications that include BlackFlash magazine, Peripheral Review, and PUBLIC.
