2016 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts

Group of Their Excellencies with the laureates of the 2016 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts and Mr. Brault.

Their Excellencies the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, and Mrs. Sharon Johnston presented the 2016 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts during a ceremony at Rideau Hall, on March 23, 2016. "I’m so impressed by the range and quality of your achievements. You are photographers and filmmakers, textile artists and painters, conceptual artists and curators. Together, your work is a testament to the vitality of the arts in Canada," said the Governor General.

The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts were created in 1999 by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Right Honourable Roméo LeBlanc, then governor general of Canada. Over the past 16 years, the awards have celebrated Canada’s vibrant arts community and recognized remarkable careers in the visual and media arts.

Since the late 1960s, William Vazan has been making “walks” and “rides” in Montréal and Toronto, as well as across Canada and around the world, documenting the journeys in sequences of photographs, maps and notes. Often ephemeral, his conceptual and minimalist land art projects of the 1960s and 1970s were created via tape and chalk lines, arrangements of stones, etc., and now only survive through photographs, books and videos. His later photoworks and land art projects on the Plains of Abraham in the City of Québec (1979), the Nazca plains in Peru (1984-86, 2001-02), in Utah and Nevada (1993), in Gotland, Sweden (1997), and in the mountains of Thebes in Egypt (2001), include quasi-mythical sculptures and rock engravings that reference prehistoric petroglyphs and the later Meso-American and Celtic art.

Mark Lewis’ film and digital moving image works often depict everyday life using cinematographic techniques that make subtle and often accidental allusions to the wider tradition of film, photography and painting. His most recent works include a series of films shot in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and the film project Invention, which imagines a contemporary city with no cinema or moving image devices. In this scenario, the city itself is the cinema, focusing on the intense concentration of moving bodies, shadows and reflections. The project spans exhibitions of his work at the Musée du Louvre in October 2014 and at the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, and culminated in a feature film, Invention, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.

For over 45 years, Suzy Lake has used her own image to confront issues of identity and power. She has produced photographs, drawings, installations, videos and performances informed by the culture and politics of her time. Using herself as the model, she addresses the relationship of the self with larger social forces—such as gender and class—and reveals the constructions and restraints we all experience. The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography mounted a major retrospective on her career in 1993. In 2014, the Art Gallery of Ontario organized a large scale exhibition, Introducing Suzy Lake, and published an award-winning publication featuring texts by Canadian and international artists, curators and scholars. Her work has been included in many significant conceptual and feminist exhibitions around the world. Active in Canada’s art scene, she is a co-founder of Vehicule Art Inc. (1972) and the Toronto Photographers Workshop (1978). In 2013, she was awarded the Dazibao Prize from the Montréal-based art gallery and book publisher, which led to the launch in 2015 of her artist book, Suzy Lake: Performing an Archive.

With a career spanning four decades, Wanda Koop is recognized as one of Canada’s most distinguished and inventive artists. Her work consistently pushes the boundaries of colour and presentation, while speaking to the transformative power of visual language to tap into our collective imagination and shape our cultural identity. Her work has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and was the subject of a major 25-year survey exhibition by the National Gallery of Canada and the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2010). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Order of Canada, three honorary doctorates (Emily Carr, and the universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba), and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond and Golden Jubilee medals. Recently, the Canadian Art Foundation established the Wanda Koop Research Fund in her honour.

Recipient of the Saidye Bronfman Award - Jane Kidd’s beautiful, technically demanding and conceptually rich tapestries provoke questions about the craft, disciplinary knowledge and the importance of bringing historical practices into the contemporary art arena. Using symbolic images, she explores the complications and contradictions of current issues, encouraging us to reflect on our changing world. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Canada, the United States, Japan, Poland, Hungary and Australia. Her work can be found in private and public collections, including the Art Bank of the Canada Council for the Arts, Global Affairs Canada, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canadian Museum of History. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art in 2001 and was awarded the Alberta Craft Council Award of Excellence in 2008.

"Philip Hoffman is one of the few contemporary filmmakers whose work provides a bridge to the classical themes of death, diaspora, memory and finally, transcendence.” (Martha Rosler, artist and professor of media and critical studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey) He has been honoured with more than a dozen retrospectives of his work, as well as with the publication Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman, comprising some 25 essays by academics and artists. He has also received numerous awards, including the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Award and the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Gus Van Sant Award. In 2014, his interactive work, Racing Home, was presented in the exhibition Border Cultures, at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

Recipient of the Outstanding Contribution Award - Through her diverse and ambitious curatorial practice, Marnie Fleming has reimagined the role of a regional art museum in building a community and in supporting the careers of emerging artists. Over her 25 years as curator of contemporary art at Oakville Galleries, she invited hundreds of artists to enter into a dialogue about Oakville, its architecture, social structure and history, and on broader suburban themes, such as sprawl, consumerism and car culture. She began her career at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the London Regional Art Gallery, now Museum London. Later, she moved to Oakville Galleries where she organized landmark solo projects with some of Canada’s best-known artists and group exhibitions with the National Gallery of Canada, The Power Plant in Toronto and many others. She has authored numerous exhibition catalogues on renowned artists such as Micah Lexier, Janet Cardiff, Kim Adams, Roy Arden and Angela Grauerholz.

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His imagery explores the collective impact we as a species are having on the surface of the planet; an inspection of the human systems we have imposed onto natural landscapes. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over 60 major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His many distinctions include the TED Prize, the Outreach Award at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Roloff Beny Book Award, and the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award. He sits on the board of directors for CONTACT: Toronto’s International Photography Festival and the Ryerson Gallery and Research Centre. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and he currently holds six honorary doctorate degrees.

Mr. Simon Brault, Director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, also delivered remarks.

Photo of Their Excellencies with Mr. Brault, the laureates and the presenters.