8 winners named for Governor General's Awards in Visual Arts
CBC Arts | Posted: March 20, 2007 2:00 PM | Last Updated: March 20, 2007
Eightexemplary Canadian artists have won Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts announced Tuesday at a news conference in Toronto.
The awards, which recognize distinguished contributions to the visual arts, come with prize money of $25,000, recently increased from $15,000. Winners also receive a sculpture by New Brunswick ceramist Peter Powning.
The winners of 2007awards for visual and media arts are:
- Ian Carr-Harris: A Toronto sculptor, installation artist and video maker, Carr-Harris is influencing a generation of other artists with his teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He represented Canada at the 1984 Venice Biennale, at Documenta 8 in 1987 and at the Sydney Biennale in 1990.
- Aganetha Dyck: A Winnipeg sculptor and mixed media artist, Dyck’s work is based on everyday objects and rooted in her Mennonite background. The jury described her as a "remarkable artist" whose art shows "a great sense of humour and wit." Her current work using honeycomb has made a stir in Canadian arts circles.
- R. Bruce Elder: A Toronto avant-garde filmmaker, critic and teacher of film studies at Ryerson University, Elder created the 20-film cycle The Book of All the Dead and The Book of Praise.
- Murray Favro: A London, Ont.-based artist whom the jury refers to as a "master of transformation," Favro works in sculpture, drawing and multi-media. He has been influential as a member of the London Regionalist School of artists and is a guitarist in the Nihilist Spasm Band.
- Fernand Leduc: A Montreal-based abstract painter, Leduc has recently focused on abstract landscapes. Leduc was a member of the Automatistes in the 1940s, with Jean-Paul Riopelle and Paul-Émile Borduas, and returned to Montreal in 2006 after many years in France.
- Daphne Odjig: A Penticton, B.C.-based painter, Odjig mixes traditional aboriginal styles and images with cubist and surreal influences. Born on Manitoulin Island, she addresses themes of colonization, displacement and the status of First Nations women and children in her work.
The winner of the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in the fine crafts was also announced. The 2007 recipient is Paul Mathieu, a native of Bouchette, Que., who lives in Vancouver.
Mathieu has had 20 solo exhibitions of his ceramics, which he describes as "handmade, very permanent, tactile, functional and based on direct physical experience in its making and appreciation."
Educator honoured
The winner of theaward for outstanding contribution to the arts was Toronto-based writer and educator David P. Silcox, who is president of art auction house Sotheby's Canada.
Mathieu and Silcox join the other six in receiving a $25,000 award.
Silcox has worked as an art critic, helped create the arts grants system at the Canada Council and helped shape the faculty of fine arts at York University. He has written several books on Canadian artists, including David Milne and the Group of Seven.
Silcox's current project is a book on the auction business and he is editing the letters of artist Harold Town, he said in an interview with CBC Arts Online.
Silcox is a strategic thinker, who, in his years of serving Canadian arts organizations, has considered the shape of Canada's arts community and the legacy of Canadian art.
He's not as interested "in moving canvases by dead artists" in his position at Sotheby's as focusing attention on new, living artists, he said.
"I've written about dead artists. I'm more concerned about living artists who need some support," he said.
But he also worries about the lack of full documentation of the work of many Canadian artists.
His book on David Milne is one of the few that catalogue a full career. "I'd like to see the same for more people — A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Emily Carr for a start," he said.
Need for recognition
Artists need an "act of recognition for their work to have an historical dimension," Carr-Harris said, adding he was excited about his own win.
The Governor General's Awards are important for connecting artists to the Canadian people, he said.
"There's a mythology about the artist being by himself and needing only the self," Carr-Harris said. "I try to impress on my students that art is a social business."
Carr-Harris has an intense interest in how people speak to one another. His illuminated books try to put a boundary around one kind of language — the written world.
"Language is important to me … the whole way we frame things for one another," he said. "It really represents ways to understand how to be in the world."
Elder was nominated for the GG by two of his graduate students, both talented young women filmmakers. They sought out information on how to make a nomination and followed through, leading a prolonged round of applause for their instructor during the announcement Tuesday, which was held at Ryerson.
Elder said he almost discouraged them from applying, thinking he didn't have a chance.
As a filmmaker, Elder likes to rely on chance. "Chance allows me to set human will aside," he said in an interview with CBC Arts Online, describing how he is using computer-generated effects to alter his images.
His next project is a meditation on alchemy called The Young Prince.
"Alchemy is a means to change base metals into gold, but it's also a metaphor for the transformation of the human body into another form … seeking a higher spiritual awareness," he said.
Studio in garage
Favro's installation pieces are owned by galleries across the country.
Many of them are very large, like his large-scale sculptural installation of a SD40 diesel train engine.
Favro works out of a double garage beside his London, Ont., home and the 12-metre train was a bit of a challenge. He built it in pieces in the studio.
"But I couldn't look at it there," he recalls. "I set it up in part of a mall that had closed down."
That project was based on hundreds of preparatory drawings, but in the last eight years Favro has moved a lot of the preparatory work onto the computer.
He's working now on a project based on Vermeer's lush interiors;he wants to take what the Dutch painter has put into two dimensions and make it into sculpture.
"I'd like to do the opposite of what he did. I'm experimenting with capturing it on the computer first," he said.
An exhibition celebrating the winners and their works will open at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa March 22.
The awards will be presented March 23 at Rideau Hall in Ottawa by Governor General Michaëlle Jean.