- Work by Katherine Takpannie, Ottawa; Curtiss Randolph, Toronto, Noah Friebel, Vancouver/Berlin; Chris Donovan, Saint John; Dainesha Nugent-Palache, Brampton; and Dustin Brons, Vancouver on view from June 25 to November 14, 2021
- Founded by the National Gallery of Canada in partnership with Scotiabank, the award recognizes outstanding work by Canadians 35 and under specializing in lens-based art.
- The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Canada in partnership with Scotiabank, the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and Ryerson University.
TORONTO and OTTAWA, ON, July 6, 2021 /CNW/ - Lens-based artworks by the New Generation Photography Award 2020 and 2021 winners Katherine Takpannie, Curtiss Randolph, Noah Friebel, Chris Donovan, Dainesha Nugent-Palache, and Dustin Brons are featured in a free outdoor exhibition now open and on view until November 14, 2021, at the Ryerson Image Centre on the campus of Ryerson University in downtown Toronto, as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. These artists were recognized as Canada's brightest young photographers by the National Gallery of Canada and Scotiabank. The New Generation Photography Award is the only prize recognizing Canadian lens-based artists aged 35 and under.
This year's exhibition, organized by the National Gallery or Canada in partnership with Scotiabank, the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, and Ryerson University, brings together the works of the 2020 winners Curtiss Randolph, Katherine Takpannie, Noah Friebel, and the 2021 winners Dustin Brons, Chris Donovan, Dainesha Nugent-Palache.
The artists, who received $10,000 each, were selected by an acclaimed jury made up of photography experts, artists, and leaders in the visual arts community. The winners' works will also be on view in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, from August 13 to December 5, 2021.
The New Generation Photography Award exhibition is curated by Andrea Kunard, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada.
Quotes:
"The combined 2020 and 2021 Edition attests to photography's broad expressive capacity. In some cases, straight documentary approaches convey issues of social urgency. Other works mix photography's descriptive capacities with narrative strategies to present personal journeys. The medium's privileged relationship to conceptual art is also explored as well as its ability to depict issues of identity and culture."—Andrea Kunard, Senior Curator, Photographs, National Gallery of Canada, and curator of the New Generation Photography Award exhibitions.
"Scotiabank is proud to play a role in celebrating the creative vision and accomplishments of our country's most promising new lens-based artists. We have a deep passion for supporting the arts, which includes helping young artists grow through unique opportunities such as the New Generation Photography Award."—Laura Curtis Ferrera, Chief Marketing Officer, Scotiabank.
"We're excited to host this unique exhibition honouring emerging talents. It's a great privilege for the RIC to partner with the National Gallery of Canada and our long-time supporters at Scotiabank in their collaborative effort to elevate the careers of young Canadian photographers." —Paul Roth, Director of the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) and Chair of Ryerson University's Public Art Committee
"We are delighted to once again partner with Scotiabank, the National Gallery of Canada and the Ryerson Image Centre at Ryerson University to present the works of these incredibly talented emerging artists, whose practices creatively engage the conversations so critical to our times."—Darcy Killeen, Executive Director, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
About the 2020 winners
Toronto-born Curtiss Randolph constructs scenes as either tableau or staged documentary narratives. Having grown up in a theatre family, the elements of stage production crept into his working process at an early stage. Mixing realism, surrealism, and gonzo journalism, Randolph challenges viewers' preconceived notion of documentary style as a way to question ideas of fact and fiction in the photographic medium.
Katherine Takpannie is an Ottawa-based Inuk artist, writer and graduate of the Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS) program. Her photographs set performative and political gestures against both natural and built environments, including intimate portraits of women. Her work is held in the City of Ottawa's art collection and has appeared in Getting Under Our Skin exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph and They Forgot We Were Seeds exhibition at the Carleton University Art Gallery.
Vancouver/Berlin based Noah Friebel focuses on the fabricated aspect of the photograph, using elements of sculpture and installation to examine our relationship to images, each other, and the narrowing space in between. Since graduating from Emily Carr University with a BFA in 2018, Friebel has been part of several group shows: notably Green Glass Door at Trapp Projects and The Lind Prize 2018 at Polygon Gallery. He has an upcoming solo show at Republic Gallery in April 2020.
About the 2021 winners
Chris Donovan is a lens-based artist working in Toronto and New Brunswick. Hailing from the industrial city of Saint John, his practice focuses on the intersection of community and industry. His work has been awarded by Pictures of the Year International (U of Missouri), The Alexia Foundation (Syracuse University), The New Brunswick Arts Board, The Toronto Arts Council, and exhibited across Canada at photography festivals including CONTACT (Toronto), Capture (Vancouver), Exposure (Calgary), Flash (Winnipeg), and Zoom (Saguenay). He is a member of Boreal collective and currently pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University as a Graduate Fellow.
Toronto-based artist Dainesha Nugent-Palache has participated in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. A founding member of the plumb, an ad hoc collective of artists, writers and curators and art venue in Toronto, she has also curated for the feminist music festival and concert series Venus Fest, and Blindspots, an art exhibition and film screening where queer artists explore LGBTQ experience through a diasporic lens. Graduate and recipient of major awards, her artwork is found in The Wedge Collection, Toronto Dominion Bank Art Collection and private collections. Her experiences as an artist have also been spotlighted in CBC COVID residencies series.
Vancouver-based artist Dustin Brons, MFA (UC San Diego), BFA (UBC), and recent participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program works with the recontextualization of existing materials across photographs, videos, and text. His work incorporates visual forms from Western art history as tools to process contemporary sources. Still life and landscape painting, gestural abstraction, linguistic conceptualism, and photographic devices from pictorialism to appropriation are reconfigured in representations of climate change and gentrification, emphasizing the ways that visual forms contribute to shaping social and political understandings of these intangible yet totalizing processes.
Useful links:
- About the NEW GENERATION PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD
- About SCOTIABANK, supporter of the Scotiabank Photography Program at the National Gallery of Canada
- About the NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA
SOURCE National Gallery of Canada
For media enquiries only, please contact: Denise Siele, Senior Manager, Communications, National Gallery of Canada, [email protected]; Josée-Britanie Mallet, Senior Media and Public Relations Officer, National Gallery of Canada, [email protected]
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