Meet Concordia’s 7 new Sobey Art Award nominees

Seven Concordia students and grads were longlisted for one of the most distinguished awards in contemporary Canadian art announced on April 15, 2015.

The $50,000 Sobey Art Award is conferred annually to an established artist aged 40 or under. All nominees must have exhibited work in a public or commercial art gallery in the previous 18 months.

Since the Sobey’s inception in 2002, 27 of the university’s students, visiting artists and alumni have been longlisted. In 2014, Concordia grad Nadia Myre took home the award; she joined Raphaëlle de Groot (2012), Daniel Barrow (2010) and Michel de Broin (2007).

There are 25 nominees for the 2015 prize. The finalists will be announced at a ceremony on June 3, 2015; their work will be exhibited at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before the winner is announced on October 28.

From ephemeral installations to Indigenous pop art, here’s a look at the work of Concordia’s 2015 Sobey Art Award nominees.

2015 Sobey Art Award nominees: Concordia students and alums

The practice of Abbas Akhavan, BFA (art history & studio arts) 04, ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture and performance.

His research is deeply influenced by the specificity of the sites where he works: the architectures that house them, the economies that surround them, and the people that frequent them. 

Akhavan lives and works in Toronto and Istanbul.

Jacqueline Huang Nguyen, BFA (studio arts) 04, is a French-speaking Quebecer of Vietnamese origin, currently living and working in Stockholm, Sweden.

Nguyen completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2011) and obtained a Master of Fine Arts and a post-graduate diploma in critical studies at the Malmö Art Academy in Malmö, Sweden (2005).

She has been awarded a number of distinguished grants for her research-based practice from the Canada Council for the Arts (2010-2013), the Banff Centre, the Brenda and Jamie Mackie Fellowships for Visual Artists (2012), the Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual Arts (2009, 2010, 2013) and the Swedish Research and Development Fellowship in the Arts (2007).

Allison Katz, BFA (studio arts) 03, investigates and pushes the conventions and history of Western painting. Her work rejects formal or thematic coherence — within the picture plane or throughout the artist’s oeuvre — and therefore resists the labeling of a style.

Avoiding narrative or continuity, the artist instead chooses to approach each canvas anew, taking on different personas, and sometimes forcing opposing tastes to coexist uncomfortably within a single tableau.

Sonny Assu (a current MFA student) is Ligwildaʼxw (We Wai Kai) of the Kwakwakaʼwakw Nations. Through museum interventions, large-scale installations, sculpture, photography, printmaking and paintings, Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop art sensibility in an effort to address contemporary political and ideological issues. 

His work Home Coming, 2014, a digital intervention on a Paul Kane painting, was exhibited as part of the Exhibiting the Archive/Performing the Archive show at the FOFA in October 2014.

Assu is participating in The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art at Concordia’s FOFA Gallery from April 20 to May 29. The group show, curated by Lori Beavis and Rhonda L. Meier, seeks to explore issues of representation, stereotypes and identity in a revitalized way.

Yannick Desranleau (a current MFA student) is nominated with Chloe Lum (a current BFA student in Art History and Studio Arts).

The duo works together under the Seripop name, having exhibited in Canada and abroad. Their work can be found in several collections, notably the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the University of Maryland Art Gallery and the BMO corporate art collection.

They won the 2007 Juno Award for CD/DVD Artwork Design of the Year and are members of noise rock quartet, AIDS Wolf.

Fiona Ackerman (attendee, studio arts) is a painter, who’s originally from Montreal and now lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

While Ackerman's art is diverse in style, it is deeply rooted in the practice of painting. Whether working on a wild abstract piece or a delicately rendered portrait, her approach is at once playful and meticulous. Through her painting, Ackerman is continually reinventing the way she represents her world, her environment and her imagination.

From April 20 to May 29, see art by Sobey nominee Sonny Assu in The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art at Concordia’s FOFA Gallery.