Concordia Alums win prestigious awards

Two Fine Arts alumni, visual artist Tricia Middleton (MFA 05) and filmmaker Samer Najari (BFA 00), are both winners of the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.

The annual awards, worth $15,000 each, recognize outstanding mid-career artists in the seven disciplines funded by the Canada Council: dance, integrated arts, media arts, music, theatre, visual arts and writing and publishing. The prizes were created using funds from a generous bequest made by the late Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton to the Canada Council.

Tricia Middleton
 

Favouring the format of sculptural installation, Tricia Middleton's work is profoundly concerned with the materiality of the world - how materials are located in time, and how both their substance and their meaning changes within time. These temporary installations will often use (and reuse) all of the materials of her studio, even its dust and debris. In this way, her experiments seek to hybridize historical and contemporary material culture, detailing the migrations of form and meaning over time.

Middleton's solo exhibitions include Dark Souls at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2009) and Midnight Gallery Rambles at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2009). Recent group exhibitions include Nothing to Declare: Recent Sculpture from Canada at the Power Plant in Toronto (2010), the inaugural Quebec Triennial at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2008) and Dé-con-structions at the National Gallery of Canada (2007). Originally from Vancouver, Middleton lives in Montreal and works at Concordia University.

Samer Najari

Media artist Samer Najari, the son of a Syrian father and Lebanese mother, was born in Moscow in 1976. Shortly after beginning his studies in architecture in 1994 at the University of Damascus, he immigrated to Montreal with his family. Since then, he has obtained a BFA in film production from Concordia and completed a residency at Le Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Le Fresnoy in France (2001-03).
 
During his residency, Mr. Najari directed two films that have been screened and praised internationally, as well as an installation - Buffer Zone - via the web. After returning to Canada he directed Before the Wind Blows (2006) and Snow Hides the Shade of Fig Trees (2009). He has presented his work in a number of international festivals and won several awards.
 

Tricia Middleton: Dark Souls

Still from Snow Hides the Shade of Fig Trees