QUÉBEC CITY, April 12, 2023 /CNW/ - The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) and its Foundation are proud to contribute to the recognition and effervescence of Québec contemporary art. Since 2013, in collaboration with RBC Foundation, its valued financial partner, it has presented the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award.
Starting this year, the major event will support five artists instead of just one. This year, five women from various backgrounds have been selected by a jury based on the excellence, sustained nature, and relevance of their output: Maria Ezcurra, Anahita Norouzi, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Eve Tagny and Sara A.Tremblay. The artists will benefit from outstanding visibility at a group exhibition to be held from October 26, 2023 to January 7, 2024 at the MNBAQ and will also receive ten thousand dollars ($10 000) each. "Following the success of the first four editions of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, RBC Foundation is proud to contribute to the evolution of this unique award in Quebec through the RBC Emerging Artists program," said Nicolas Audet-Renoux, Regional Vice President, Quebec-Beauce, Central Quebec & Mauricie at RBC Royal Bank. "The efforts of the museum and its Foundation are invaluable and provide much needed opportunities for diverse emerging artists to be recognized and exposed to new audiences. We look forward to seeing the progress of these new finalists' careers over the next few years. Congratulations to all!"
A rigorous selection process
A jury comprising reputable Québec contemporary art specialists chose the five finalists: Sylvette Babin, Director of Esse magazine, Nuria Carton de Grammont, Director and Curator of SBC Gallery, Ève De Garie-Lamanque, Artistic Director of the Redford Gardens, Dominique Fontaine, curator and founder of aPOSteRIORI, and Marc–Antoine K. Phaneuf, Artistic Director of L'Œil de Poisson, accompanied by André Gilbert, MNBAQ exhibition curator, who will act as curator of the exhibition presented at the MNBAQ in the fall of 2023.
A publication and acquisition
Moreover, during the exhibition, a second jury will convene to determine a winner among the finalists in 2023. A monograph devoted to the winner's work will be published in 2024 and the MNBAQ will acquire the artist's works for its collection.
Profile of the five winners
The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award supports artists living in Québec with five to 20 years of practice, regardless of the discipline or medium. The artists have several exhibitions to their credit, but they lack representation in museums and have not yet had a significant monograph published. This recognition seeks to contribute to the blossoming of their careers by giving them a significant boost.
Maria Ezcurra
Maria Ezcurra is an Argentine-Mexican-Canadian artist and teacher who has lived in Montréal since 2010. She has presented her work frequently in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Mexico, especially at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Mexico, La Nuit Blanche in Toronto, in Oboro, at La Centrale, and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has also developed and facilitated diverse public, participatory and community art projects in diverse contexts and is one of the founders of the Intervals artists' group. Maria Ezcurra obtained a PhD in Art Education from Concordia University and is currently a course lecturer at McGill University and Concordia University. She received the Prix de la diversité en arts visuels of the Conseil des arts de Montréal (2019) and the Prix Powerhouse (2022).
The artist explores the phenomenon of migration based on her own experience as an immigrant, in an ecofeminist perspective. Her drawings, sculptures, installations, performances, and mobile works reveal the geopolitical contradictions of the Americas in the context of globalization. Her main areas of research are the cultural power of personal items and the gendered embodiment of clothing and textiles. Garments, which are at once sculptural materials and performative resources, are a central theme in her practice. Deconstructed and remodeled, they redefine the body's physical and emotional boundaries and represent the complex social relations that shape our identities.
Anahita Norouzi
Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist, originally from Tehran and active in Montreal since 2018. She holds advanced degrees in Fine Arts and Graphic Design from Concordia University in Montreal. Her work explores the notions of displacement, memory, and identity from a psycho-historical perspective. Her research focuses on two key themes, nature, and heritage, with particular emphasis on botanical explorations and archeological excavations. Through sculptures, installations, photography, or video, she articulates distinct cultural and political perspectives of the "other" and revisits forgotten narratives to demonstrate the impact of colonialism on contemporary history. Her works intermingle the past and the present, here and elsewhere, and the individual and the collective. They describe the movement of people, plants, or cultural artifacts, emphasizing the diversity of migratory experiences while questioning our affective relationship with the territory. Anahita Norouzi's work has been exhibited several times in Canada and abroad, most recently at the International Contemporary Art Biennial of South America in Buenos Aires. She has received awards and grants from the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She was a finalist for the Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize for pieces shown at the Royal College of Art's Henry Moore Gallery in London and in Dubai.
Celia Perrin Sidarous
Celia Perrin Sidarous, who lives and works in Montréal, creates series of images and photographic assemblages according to a logic that is both internal and associative. She works with an extensive fund of collected objects that are transfigured by the shot, and found pictures that are invested with unique semantic weight. The stagings, which refer as much to the history of still life as the staging of an exhibition or a visual rhetoric specific to the studio, blur the conditions whereby the objects are usually represented and interpreted. She also produces experimental short films designed like collages that unfold temporally, thereby proposing a form of extension of her photographic practice.
The works of Celia Perrin Sidarous have featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, in particular at the Centre Clark, at Bradley Ertaskiran, and the McCord Museum (Montréal), the Norsk Billedhoggerforening (Oslo), the Contact Photography Festival (Toronto), and the Focus Photography Festival (Mumbai), at Arsenal Contemporary (New York), at the Esker Foundation (Calgary), at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), at VU (Québec City), and at Gallery 44 (Toronto). Her work was included in the Biennale de Montréal 2016 – Le Grand Balcon at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. She received the Prix Pierre-Ayot 2017 and the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award 2011.
Eve Tagny
Eve Tagny combines installations, video, and performance in works that explore the spiritual expression of grief and resilience, and their correlations with cycles and natural elements. The Montréal artist's practice focuses essentially on the theme of the garden, which she perceives as a symbolic space through which our affective memory flows, and which is part of the dynamics of power and colonial histories. She produces ensembles comprising organic material, moving images, and architectural structures, in which loss, injury, hope, and rituals unfold like intimate, deeply personal motifs.
The artist holds a bachelor's degree in film production from Concordia University and a certificate in journalism from the Université de Montréal. She has presented noteworthy exhibitions at La biennale Momenta, the Musée d'art de Joliette, the Centre Clark, and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and at Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz Kaka in Toronto. She received the MFON Legacy Grant (2018) and the Bourse Plein Sud (2020), was pre-selected for the CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018), the Prix OAAG (2020), and the New Generation Photography Award (2022).
Sara A.Tremblay
Sara A.Tremblay's photography is at once poetic and conceptual. It describes experiences and places visited over time. She adopts a spontaneous approach to territory and image, assembles objects, actions, or ephemeral traces, an accumulation of snatches from her daily life, while discovering new connections between things. Her move to the countryside proved decisive to her career and has greatly inspired her. Baroque still lifes, self-portraits that highlight important events, familiar animals or immortal plants: she documents, in particular, her harvesting, which has become her main subject, in an outdoor studio, where she improvises daily with harvests and the thousands of flowers planted on her land.
The artist holds a master's degree in fine arts from Concordia University. Her works have been exhibited in Québec, Ontario, and Sweden, where she spent the summer of 2013. She received the first Bourse d'études supérieures en arts visuels Yvonne L. Bombardier and participated in the Symposium international d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul. In 2016, she crossed on foot the 650 km of the International Appalachian Trail in the context of a creative residency of the Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie. In the spring of 2020, in response to the confinement, she founded Les Encans de la quarantaine to promote virtually the work of visual artists. She works and lives in Orford.
An award with high value-added for the artists
The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is the only contemporary art award in Canada that combines an exhibition, a publication, and acquisitions. It fulfils a need to broaden public recognition of and disseminate contemporary art in addition to offering support to the artists and to their career development. The award confirms the MNBAQ's desire to play a leadership role in the realm of Québec art by encouraging the most promising artists and supporting their career development. Since 2013, through the generous contribution of RBC Foundation to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and its Fondation, the work of four Québec artists has achieved outstanding recognition: Diane Morin (2015), Carl Trahan (2017), Numa Amun (2019), and Stanley Février (2021).
RBC Foundation, a Commited Partner
RBC recognizes the struggle many artists go through to gain the recognition they need to become successful in their practice. Since 2007, the RBC Emerging Artists program has been supporting organizations that provide the best opportunity to advance an artist's career trajectory in genres such as visual arts, music, theatre, dance, literature and film.
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.
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