Vancouver's Geoffrey Farmer wins prestigious art prize

Vancouver-born multi-disciplinary artist Geoffrey Farmer has won the $50,000 Gershon Iskowitz Prize given annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada.

Prize organizers praised Farmer for " his singular approach and ability to blend poetry and social commentary in large-scale works."

"Geoffrey Farmer’s works are unique because they are constructed anew each time they’re assembled," said Kitty Scott, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Toronto-based Art Gallery of Ontario, which manages the prize along with the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.

Farmer said he is "deeply touched" to receive the prize. A graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art And Design in Vancouver, he lives and works in the city.  

 In addition to the cash prize, Farmer wins a solo exhibition at the AGO in February 2014 that Scott says will "offer visitors a chance to see the most recent workings of Geoffrey’s mind."

Farmer, 45,  recently had an exhibit at the Barbican Gallery in London titled The Surgeon and the Photographer, which featured dozens of puppet-like figures, each with a fluid identity that seems to shift as the viewer walks around them.

He made a splash at Germany’s huge Documenta art fair in 2012 with a wall-length collage Leaves of Grass 2012, constructed of 16,000 Life magazine clippings mounted on grass sticks. 

During  the Vancouver 2010 Olympics he worked on a year-long project called Every Letter in the Alphabet  that placed a variety of text-based works, mainly handcrafted signs,  in and around Vancouver. 

He has a forthcoming retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015 and his newly commissioned sculpture play, Let’s Make the Water Turn Black, is currently on display at the Migros Museum in Zurich.

The 2012 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO was awarded to Toronto sculptor Kim Adams and the resulting exhibition, Kim Adams: Recent Works, is currently on display at the gallery.