The Fourth MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award

The five finalists are sharing a $10 000 award

QUÉBEC CITY, April 27, 2020 /CNW Telbec/ - Art and artists are essential for our well-being. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), in collaboration with its financial partner RBC Foundation, is especially proud to announce the five finalists in the fourth MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, an outstanding biennial award in Canada. Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Stanley Février, Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, Marigold Santos and Walter Scott have been selected by a jury comprising Georges Azzaria, Director of the École d'art de l'Université Laval; Nathalie Bachand, an independent curator and author; Eunice Bélidor, Director of the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University and a member of the MNBAQ's external acquisition committee; Katrie Chagnon, Associate Professor in the Département d'histoire de l'art de l'UQAM; Audrey Genois, Director General of MOMENTA|Biennale de l'image; and Bernard Lamarche, Head of Collection Development and Curator of Contemporary Art (2000 to the present) at the MNBAQ. The jury met on February 13, 2020, several weeks before confinement measures were adopted to slow the coronavirus' spread.

A $10 000 award to be shared

Since last year, the five finalists have shared a $10 000 award. Each one will thus receive $2 000. "I am delighted to announce the finalists and highlight the work of the five praiseworthy artists. At this stage in the process, their excellent work sets them apart and each one has the potential to win the award," noted Annie Gauthier, Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the MNBAQ. "We are all going through a difficult period in which artists are particularly affected by the impact of the temporary closing of exhibition sites and the cancellation or postponement of artistic events. We wish to participate in a movement to sustain essential activities and thus contribute to supporting artists and focusing on the vitality of Québec's visual arts community," she added.

A second jury will convene shortly to determine the overall winner according to the established criteria, i.e. a career spanning more than 10 years, the quality and sustained nature of the artist's output and recognition by the arts community of a genuine artistic contribution, and the MNBAQ team will subsequently announce the winner. For the time being, the future winner's exhibition at the MNBAQ is slated for the fall of 2021, at which time the monograph will be launched. This special award will support the winner's career and, above all, give it considerable momentum.

A prestigious award to foster a career

Since 2013, through RBC Foundation's contribution to the MNBAQ and its Foundation, which led to the establishment of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, the work of three Québec artists, Diane Morin in 2013, Carl Trahan in 2017, and Numa Amun in 2019, has been vividly showcased. Each of the award winners has been offered a personal exhibition at the MNBAQ, a retrospective publication, and the purchase by the MNBAQ collection of $50 000 of the artist's works.

Profile of the five finalists

Stanley Février

Stanley Février is a plastic artist who perceives art as a vector for social change and closely scrutinizes the social dynamics that are emerging in western societies. Through contemporary tragedies, he questions the value of life against a backdrop of globalization. Motivated by a desire to stoke a collective consciousness, he appropriates and modifies images, videos and photographs of the dramas captured on the Internet. Through his installations, performances and participatory art projects, Stanley Février creates a meeting place that puts participants at the centre of the work. To finalize the work, he leads them to become repoliticized and assert their experience. Mr. Février graduated in the visual and media arts. His recent artistic and conceptual preoccupations hinge on institutional criticism, identity issues, and the violence and inequality that the latter engender. Since 2007, he has participated in several solo exhibitions and 15 group exhibitions in Québec and abroad.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born Montreal based artist working with performance, photography, and video. She received a BFA from Emily Carr University Art & Design and MFA from Concordia University. She has exhibited her works and performed in multiple international venues and festivals, such as Quebec City Biennial, MOMENTA | Biennale de l'image, Kaunas Biennial, The Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Paris, The Aine Art Museum in Tornio, Bury Art Museum in Manchester, Museo de la Cancillería in Mexico City, Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival in Chicago, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto, and so on. Among many other grants and awards, she was the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award for contemporary avant-garde art in New York in 2014 and listed the "10 Artists Who Are Reinventing History" by Canadian Art in 2017.

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau

Theatricality and choreography characterize the work of multidisciplinary visual artists Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, which frequently melds performance, dance, and sculpture. In their recent works, the duo examines the role of objects, the material condition of the body and the potential for transformation that the body and the objects exercise on each other, seeking inspiration in Chloë Lum's experience of chronic diseases and their impact on their collaboration. They have participated in numerous exhibitions, at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; Gallery TPW in Toronto; the Or Gallery in Vancouver; the Center for Books and Paper Arts, Columbia College in Chicago; the Kunsthalle Wien; the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; the Whitechapel Project Space in London; the University of Texas in Austin; the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown; the  Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto; and the Darling Foundry in Montréal. Their works are found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. In 2015, they were nominated on the long list of the Sobey Art Award.

Marigold Santos

Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1988. She pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice that examines lived experience and storytelling, presented within the otherworldly. Her work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by experiences of movement and migration. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada. Her solo exhibitions have been shown at the ODD Gallery in Dawson City, Yukon, ACE Art in Winnipeg, Eastern Edge in St. John's NFL, The Richmond Art Gallery, Galerie Articule, Stride Gallery, and she was recently selected to participate in the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2017.

Walter Scott

Walter Kaheró:ton Scott (b. 1985) is a Kahnawake born contemporary artist, currently based in Montreal and Toronto. Scott's interdisciplinary practice includes drawing, writing, video, performance, and sculpture. Through his work, Scott explores contemporary questions of representation, cultural production, popular culture, and narrative construction. Scott has shown in solo and group exhibitions in Japan, North America, Europe, and the United States. His most recent exhibitions include Slipping on the Missing X at Macaulay & Co Fine Art and Betazoid in a Fog at the Remai Modern. In 2016, Scott was Artist-In-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He was recently an artist-in-residence at the ISCP, in Brooklyn, New York, in 2019. Scott recieved his Masters in Fine Arts from Univsersity of Guelph in 2018. His comic series, Wendy, chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical version of the contemporary art world. Wendy has been featured in Canadian Art, Art in America, and published online on the New Yorker.

The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is given every two years to a Québec artist thanks to the remarkable partnership between the MNBAQ and RBC Foundation. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a government corporation which receives funding from the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec.

SOURCE Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec