TFVA prizewinners are very busy at the beginning of 2024 – read all about them!
Sandra Brewster – Artist Prize Winner 2018
Sandra Brewster works in drawing, video, photo-based works, and installation. Through her community-based practice, she engages with themes including identity, representation, and memory, centering on a Black presence located in Canada. She uses specific landscapes as metaphors, and manipulates old photographs to centre the people within them. Born to Guyanese parentage, her work refers to the migration of Caribbean people from the region, suggesting a formation of identity that encompasses multiple geographies and a sense of identity that exists within the diaspora.
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto at the Justina M Barnicke Gallery (in Hart House) is presenting Sediment: The Archive as a Fragmentary Base (January 17 – March 23, 2024).
The artists in this exhibition, which include Sandra Brewster, re-imagine the archive as these material fragments that may narrate presences, proximities, and solidarities. This show is curated by Denise Ryner.
Niall McClelland – Artist Prize Finalist 2015
Niall McClelland’s vibrant abstractions recall the unpredictable patterns of tie-dye, Rorschach tests, and computer static. Inspired by a DIY-punk aesthetic and a background in graphic design, the artist exploits the imperfections inherent in easily accessible materials and reproduction techniques, such as ink and photocopying.
Hunt Gallery recently exhibited a group showing of 15 paintings by 15 artists, including Niall McClelland (Dec 8 – Jan 6, 2024).
Camille Turner – Artist Prize Finalist 2018
The University of Waterloo Art Gallery UWAG (January 11 – March 9, 2024) is proud to welcome the collaborative duo of Camal Pirbhai and Camille Turner, whose new exhibition, unearth includes recent photo-based artworks House of Bâby(2021) and Rocks (2021-2023). These works explore the passage of time and memory, in the process of excavating the hidden history of people of colour in Canada. Working collectively, Camal & Camille bring together their wide range of experiences and skills to create artworks in a variety of media that emerge from their shared concerns.
American Art Basel of Miami – (Dec 2023)
American Art Basel of Miami, one of the most famous and prestigious art fairs in the world, brought together 277 leading international galleries to present artworks across all media. Showings included works by the following Artist Prize recipients: Esmaa Mohamoud, Artist Prize Winner 2019, Tau Lewis, Artist Prize Finalist 2019 and Shary Boyle, Artist Prize Finalist 2006.
Dana Prieto – Artist Prize Finalist 2022
Dana Prieto’s work is included in GUT_Brain 1 (Part 2) at The Blackwood, University of Toronto Mississauga (January 8–March 15, 2024). The exhibition is part of series that will be staged in six movements in sites between Mississauga, Canada and Oaxaca, Mexico. The project is premised on the idea that, as earth’s rhythms have been made to converge with anthropocentric needs and desires, the nutrient cycling process has been disrupted. The impact of these changes has led us to a ‘posthuman’ condition – with chemicals, pesticides and plastics as part of our bodies as much as of our ecosystems.
Connecting artists, scholars and activists from across the Americas, GUT_BRAIN 1 acknowledges the damage created by this interdependency and imagines possible futures. The first movement, Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess, curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz and Christine Shaw, begins at the mouth, tracking the destinies of excess: the origins and symptoms of injurious forms of interdependency that have led to our toxic world.
Dana Prieto’s olfactory installation, physically and poetically entangles us with the smell of soil near sites of gold extraction by Canadian mining companies operating in the Americas.
Maria Hupfield – Artist Prize 2023
Maria Hupfield recently exhibited works as part of the collaborative duo Native Art Department International (Maria Hupfield + Jason Lujan) at Patel Brown Montréal (ended December 23, 2023). In his exhibition, text Manuel Mathieu praises the sense of “the power and beauty of nature, spirituality, and mysticism” that connect the works in High Magick.
Chris Curreri – Artist Prize Winner 2011
Chris Curreri works with film, photography, and sculpture, and his work is premised on the idea that things in the world are not defined by essential properties, but rather by the actual relationships that we establish with them.
Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present Now You Don’t, Chris Curreri’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery (January 11 – February 17, 2024). This exhibition is the first presentation of Curreri’s large-scale work Self Portrait with Luis Jacob (2022) in Toronto. It was previously included in Curreri’s solo exhibitions A Surrogate, A Proxy, A Stand-In at Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston; That, There, It at the Contemporary Calgary, and Games That Two Can Play at Occurrence in Montreal as part of Momenta Biennale de l’image.
