Tag Archives: alumni

Emily Carr Alum Nadia Myre wins 2014 Sobey Art Award!

November 21, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Nadia Myre a Quebec-based Algonquin artist known for using small, craft-based media to make a big aesthetic and political impact—has won the $50,000 first place prize at this year’s Sobey Art Award.
The award win was announced November 19th at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where an exhibition of the Sobey Award finalists continues until January 11, 2015.
“Myre has built a distinctive visual vocabulary by translating her experience and that of others into works that employ traditional crafts within a contemporary, multidisciplinary practice,” the prize jury said in a release. “Her artwork creates a symbolic image of wounding and resilience that conveys something deeply human while addressing urgent social concerns.”
Born in 1974 in Montreal, Myre is known for work that addresses identity, language, longing and loss—often conveyed through media related to traditional Aboriginal beadwork or stitchery.
The title of Myre’s 2013 work For those who cannot speak: the land, the water, the animals and the future generations, for instance, was inspired by a declaration read by Algonquin kokoms (grandmothers) on Parliament Hill on January 11, 2013. The piece consisted of a long black-and-white beaded belt—one somewhat reminiscent of the wampum belt form—that was blown up photographically to 23 metres long for the National Gallery of Canada’s recent indigenous art survey “Sakahàn.”
Another notable Myre work is Indian Act (2000–2003), which covered all 56 pages of the titular Canadian legislation with red and white beads—white beads replaced the words of the act, while the red beads replaced the negative space. The project also had a collaborative aspect, with more than 200 friends, colleagues and strangers pitching in to complete the beading on the project.
Collaboration and group process also comes to the fore in Myre’s Scar Project, which commenced in 2005. In this project, viewers and members of the public are invited to sew, on canvas, representations of their own physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual scars. Participants were also encouraged to share and record related stories, with more than 800 scars and stories collected in the course of the project.
A graduate of Camosun College (1995), Emily Carr (1997), and Concordia University (MFA, 2002), Myre is included in “Formes et Paroles” at the Musée Dapper in Paris, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and “Before and After the Horizon: Anishinabe Artists of the Great Lakes” at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Article from http://canadianart.ca/news/2014/11/19/nadia-myre-sobey-art-award/

Alumni Spotlight: Charlene Vickers

November 18, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe artist living and working in Vancouver. Trained as a painter, she graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (94) and attained a BA from Simon Fraser University in Critical Studies of the Arts (98). She is an MFA grad at Simon Fraser University (2013) and is on the Board of Directors at grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC. Born in Kenora Ontario and raised in Toronto her art explores her Ojibway ancestry and her experiences growing up and living in urban spaces.
She explains her body of work as: “My work concerns memory and expression of Aboriginal identity where materials carry social and cultural significance. In the past my work has dealt with the commodity aspect of Aboriginal culture selling an idealized First Nations body. Issues of racism and marginalization are exposed in the works presenting a realistic rather than romanticized reality for Aboriginal peoples. I reinvented typical Native objects sold to tourists and combined them with personal comments on urban living for aboriginal peoples.”
Her interdisciplinary work searches the arenas of painting,sculpture, performance and video to explore how memory, healing and ties to ancestral lands can be achieved through bodily gesture and archival images. As Vestige Vagabond, Charlene most recently collaborated with Maria Hupfield in performances at Panoply Performance Lab in Brooklyn, NY and the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro 2014 in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the US, and can be seen in the permanent collections at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver.

Check out Charlene’s work here: http://charlenevickersvisualartist.blogspot.ca

Alumni Spotlight: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

November 12, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. In combining his own experiences with a political perspective, he paints landscapes with vivid, acidic colours, merging Native iconography with a surrealist influence to address West Coast Native issues.
Yuxweluptun is Salish for “man of many masks,” a name given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at the age of fourteen. It is Cowichan Salish belief that the Sxwaixwe is a supernatural being who came down from the sky to live at the bottom of a lake. There is a dance associated with this creature in which the mask plays an important role. Yuxweluptun explains, “You carry the mask that belongs to your family and you identify with the animal on the mask.” (Robin Laurence, “Man of Masks,” Canadian Art, Spring 1995).
Yuxweluptun’s political roots can be traced back to childhood. His father was founder of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and Vice President of the North American Native Brotherhood. His mother was Executive Director of the Indian Homemakers Association of British Columbia. With his parents as role models, Yuxweluptun was involved in Native politicization, attending meetings, demonstrations, and mailing out copies of The Native Voice, the province’s first Native newspaper.
Yuxweluptun has chosen art as a way to voice his political concerns, exposing environmental destruction and the struggle of Native people. He believes that his artwork stimulates dialogue between Native and non-Native people.
learn more at: http://lawrencepau lyuxweluptun.com

Alumni Spotlight: Marianne Nicolson

October 28, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Marianne Nicolson is a 1996 graduate from Emily Carr’s visual arts program!

Nicolson is a member of the Dzawada’enuxw Tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations who reside on the coastal mainland of British Columbia. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and a MFA in Visual Art from the University of Victoria. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2008), Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2007), Artspeak (2006), Thunder Bay Art Gallery (2002), and the National Indian Art Centre (2001). She has also participated in group exhibitions at Equinox Gallery (2011), 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (2010), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Olympic Museum, Lausanne (2009), Museum of Arts & Design, New York (2005), and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (1999), among others. Her artworks are contemporary expressions of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw concepts. Due to an emerging belief that these concepts could be better understood through comprehension of the Kwak’wala language and a growing concern over the endangered status of this indigenous language, she engaged in linguistic and anthropological study at the University of Victoria where she completed an Interdisciplinary MA in 2005. In 2012, she completed her PhD research involving the conceptualization of space and time in Kwakwaka’wakw language and art and the importance of indigenous language to indigenous worldview

learn more about Nicolson’s work at:
http://www.mariannenicolson.com/

Alumni spotlight: Sonny Assu

October 21, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Sonny Assu is a 2002 graduate from Emily Carr’s visual art program!

Sonny Assu (b.1975)
Through museum interventions, large-scale installations, sculpture, photography, printmaking and paintings, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop art sensibility in an effort to address contemporary, political and ideological issues. His work often focuses on Indigenous issues and rights, consumerism, branding and new technologies, and the ways in which the past has come to inform contemporary ideas and identities. Assu infuses his work with wry humour to open the dialogue towards the use of consumerism, branding and technology as totemic representation. Within this, his work deals the loss of language, loss of cultural resources and the effects of colonization upon the Indigenous people of North America.
His work has been accepted into the National Gallery of Canada, the Seattle Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Anthropology at UBC and in various other public and private collections across Canada and the United States.
Sonny is Liǥwildaʼx̱w (We Wai Kai) of the Kwakwaka’wakw nations. He graduated from the Emily Carr University in 2002 and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Concordia University. He received the BC Creative Achievement Award in First Nations art in 2011 and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012 and 2013. He currently lives and works in Montreal.

bio from his website, learn more about his work at:
http://sonnyassu.com/

Luke Parnell | Shine a Light: Canadian Biennale 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada

September 27, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

We’re delighted to announce that the National Gallery of Canada has acquired two works by Luke Parnell (MAA ’12) for their permanent collection. Phantom Limbs and A Brief History of Northwest Coast Design will be featured in Shine a Light: Canadian Biennale 2014.

Shine a Light highlights a selection of recent acquisitions to the National Gallery of Canada’s Canadian Contemporary, Indigenous and Photography holdings. It showcases some of the best most innovative works being made today in a variety – and often combination of- media, from video and film to drawing and painting, photography to sculpture and installation. It reveals the unique ways contemporary Canadian artists are responding to the larger social and political state of the world through their art and how they are choosing interdisciplinary modes of self-expression that transcend traditional categories, materials and genres. The exhibition takes the pulse of contemporary art production in Canada as it becomes part of our national art history.

The exhibition runs October 14 – March 8, 2015. Luke will present an artist talk, October 18.