The Scotiabank Photography Award is Canada’s largest and most prestigious annual peer-nominated and peer-reviewed award that acknowledges the outstanding contribution that our winners have made to contemporary art and photography. These are artists who strive to invent, influence and redefine the reception of art in ways that will endure. The Scotiabank Photography Award winner exhibition is a featured primary exhibition co-curated by Paul Roth & Gaëlle Morel at the Ryerson Image Centre during the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. The winner also receives a $50,000 cash prize and a book of their work published and distributed worldwide by Steidl of Germany.
The Award was founded in 2010, on behalf of Scotiabank, by Edward Burtynsky, internationally-renowned Canadian photo artist and Chair of the Scotiabank Photography Award with Jane Nokes, Scotiabank’s former Director, Arts, Culture and Heritage, to strengthen Scotiabank’s commitment to the Arts in Canada.
The longlist is announced in January and the short list is announced in March. The winner will be announced on May 3rd during the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, along with the opening of the exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre and the book launch for the previous year’s winner, Angela Grauerholz.
The winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Photography Award is Suzy Lake.
Lake is one of the most accomplished, internationally acclaimed photographer in Canada whose work address personal and social issues like identity, family and personal history, femininity and aging among others.
The 2016 Scotiabank Photography Award Shortlist Finalists were:
Pascal Grandmaison
Pascal Grandmaison, verre, 2004
Pascal Grandmaison was born in Montreal in 1975, and earned his Bachelor of Fine and Media Arts degree from Université du Québec à Montréal (1997). His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Casino Luxembourg–Forum d’art contemporain, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario) Prefix Photo (Toronto), and in numerous group exhibitions, including Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, La Compagnie, lieu de creation (Marseilles), Centre culturel canadien (Paris). His videos have been presented internationally, most recently at Haus der Kulturen des Welt (Berlin), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Edinburgh Art Festival (Edinburgh), Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing), Centre Pompidou (Paris). Pascal Grandmaison is a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award.
Suzy Lake
Suzy Lake, Forever Young, 2000
Suzy Lake began her art practice in 1968, after moving to Montreal from her birthplace, Detroit, following the social and political unrest of the 1960s. Lake was among the first female artists in Canada to adopt performance, video, and photography to explore the politics of gender, the body, and identity. In 1972 she formed Véhicule Art Inc. with twelve other artists to establish one of the first artist-run centres in Canada. She moved to Toronto in 1978 where she became a co-founder of the Toronto Photographers Workshop. Lake taught for 40 years in Montreal, Toronto, and most recently as head of the University of Guelph photo department. Lake currently lives and makes work in Toronto.
Lake was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective, Point of Reference, organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1993. In 2007 Lake was one of 120 women in the historical show WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an exhibition organized by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that toured to galleries across the U.S. and Canada, including the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lake’s participation in historical exhibitions includes Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake, 1972-1978 (Santa Monica Museum of Art), The Pictures Generation (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Held Together With Water (Sammlung Verbund, Vienna). In 2014 the Art Gallery of Ontario presented a full-career retrospective titled Introducing Suzy Lake.
Lake’s most recent project involves researching and photographically performing her family history from 1880-1925, which includes traces of Detroit’s rejuvenation. The work is sponsored by a Knight Foundation residency. The photographs in this work are featured in a book titled Suzy Lake: Performing an Archive, published by Dazibao. Prints from the book are scheduled to be exhibited at the McMaster Art Gallery, Hamilton Art Gallery and the Windsor Art Gallery.
Jayce Salloum
Jayce Salloum’s photograph
Jayce Salloum’s work exists in/between the very personal, quotidian, local and the transnational. It takes place in a variety of contexts though has consistently been about mediation – the gap between the experience and the accounting/telling/receiving of it, engaging in an intimate subjectivity and discursive/dialectical challenge while critically asserting itself in the representation and perception of social manifestations and realities.
He has worked in photography since 1978, as well as curating exhibitions, conducting workshops and facilitating a vast array of cultural projects. Lately the work has taken place in Austria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, China, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, former Yugoslavia, Galapagos Islands, and other places throughout the Americas. After 22 years living in San Francisco, Banff, Toronto, San Diego, Beirut, and New York, he moved to Vancouver and has been based there since 1997.
Salloum tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, thus his projects are rooted in a connectivity with place(s), and the people that inhabit them. He relies on the kindness of strangers, especially when he is in unfamiliar territory, speaks next to nothing of the language or knows less than he thinks he does which is most of the time. He has been producing art, collecting interesting objects, making things happen and mixing it up discursively for as long as he can remember. It was always part art and part social lubrication, or maybe that makes it all ‘art’, anyways it usually challenged whatever the dominant culture was and involved people from various parts in liaison and/or at odds with each other.
He has exhibited at the widest range of local and international venues possible, as well as at some unusual ones, occasionally on the side of a building or at the side of a road, bus shelters, a rocky shoreline or down in the woods, from the smallest unnamed storefronts & community centres in his downtown eastside neighbourhood to institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada; Museum of Modern Art–NYC; Musée du Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume¬–Paris; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien–Berlin; Museum Villa Stuck–Munich; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia–Madrid; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; and the 15th Biennale Of Sydney.
His work has appeared in many journals e.g. Third Text, Framework, Prefix Photo, Fuse, Public and Semiotext(e) and in books including, Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower/Columbia Univ.) and The Archive (Modern Reader Series¬–Whitechapel Gallery). Essays on his work featured in Image and Inscription: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography (YYZ/Gallery 44) and other anthologies. The monograph, Jayce Salloum: history of the present, was released in 2009. His most recent text on photography was just published in The Militant Image Reader (Edition Camera Austria–Graz), with a collaborative version to be published in Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas: Between the Local and the Global (Palgrave Macmillan). Salloum is a recipient of the 2014 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.
The 2015 winner Angela Grauerholz will have his Scotiabank Photography Award book launch and exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre, from May 4 to August 21, 2016.
The 2016 Scotiabank Photography Award winner will be announced on May 3, 2016 at the Ryerson Image Centre. For more information about the prize please visit www.scotiabankphotoaward.com.