West Coast & Yukon - Jeremy Shaw
Ideas | CBC | Posted: November 7, 2016 3:33 PM | Last Updated: November 7, 2016
The Sobey Art Award is Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art. The annual prize is given to an artist under age 40, who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated.
Jeremy Shaw works in a variety of media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience. Often combining and amplifying strategies from the realms of conceptual art, ethnographic film, music video, mystical and scientific research, Shaw proposes a post-documentary space in which disparate ideals, belief-systems and narration are put into crisis. He has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, US, Schinkel Pavillon, DE, and MOCCA, CA, and been featured in group exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, NE, KW Institute, DE, and Palais de Tokyo, FR.
Sobey Art Award Juror Jonathan Middleton on Jeremy Shaw:
"Jeremy Shaw is an acclaimed artist and musician. His compelling visual art works, largely produced in film, video and photography, frequently draw on his interest in the psychedelic: depicting altered states of mind or similar states of reverie through which we look at the world with new eyes. In this sense, the psychedelic is analogous to art making – promising a new perspective from which we hope to learn about the world and understand it better. In my mind, Shaw has more kinship with famed British scientist Humphry Osmond than counter-culture guru Timothy Leary. His work is as investigative as it is generative."