Vancouver Art Gallery Presents Audain Prize and VIVA Awards
/The following is partially excerpted from a release issued by the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Image: Vancouver Art Gallery.
On May 24, 2018, the Vancouver Art Gallery will present four distinguished BC artists with the most prestigious visual art awards in the Province: the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts and the VIVA Awards. This year, Susan Point will be the sixteenth recipient of the Audain Prize, supported by the Audain Foundation. Of the two 2018 VIVA Awards granted annually by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, one award will recognize co-recipients Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed, who will together receive this honour, and the second VIVA Award will be given to Charlene Vickers.
“The Vancouver Art Gallery is thrilled to recognize four outstanding artists with the most coveted arts awards in the Province. This is a night to celebrate and spotlight British Columbia’s finest artists whose work has had significant influence on visual arts in Canada,” says the Vancouver Art Gallery’s director Kathleen S. Bartels. “We thank the Audain Foundation and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for their generosity in establishing these awards and continuing to support and acknowledge the talent and commitment of BC artists.”
Audain Prize recipient Susan A. Point, O.C., DFA, DLitt, RCA, of the Musqueam First Nation, inherited ancestral learnings and the traditions of her people from her mother. Point is the Daughter of Edna Grant and Anthony Point, and the niece of Dominic Point and Mike Kew, who passed the traditional stories of the Musqueam on to her when she was a child. Point has been a key figure in re-establishing the vitality of Salish art, drawing inspiration from the designs of her ancestors and exploring the use of non-traditional materials to forcefully assert the vitality of Salish culture in the contemporary world. An Officer of the Order of Canada, Point has been recognized with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to Canada. She has also been acknowledged with an Indspire Achievement Award, a YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, a B.C. Creative Achievement Award, among other honours, and is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2016, Point received the City of Vancouver’s Civic Merit Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award for First Nations Art from the BC Achievement Foundation.
VIVA Award co-recipients Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling have been collaborating since 2006. Their projects take shape as public installations, social situations, and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed matter, and artists’ multiples. They are currently fascinated with collaborative research, especially in their recent projects with children. In Fall 2017, they released Multiple Elementary, a book that explores the elementary school classroom as a site of invention and reception of contemporary art practices, published by YYZBOOKS. They are recipients of the 2016 Ian Wallace Award for Teaching Excellence (Emily Carr University of Art & Design) and a 2017 Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Public Art (City of Vancouver).
VIVA Award recipient Charlene Vickers’ work investigates memory, territorial embodiment and cultural gesture as connections to her birthplace of Kenora, Ontario. Vickers, who is Anishinaabe from Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, explores her Ojibwa identity through painting, sculpture, performance and video. In a recent series of watercolour and gouache paintings, Vickers references traditional porcupine quillwork techniques as formal rhythms and patterns, which gain both subtle detail and increased abstraction with each iteration.
To read the BC Alliance's recent interview with Audain Prize recipient Susan Point, click here.
