QUÉBEC CITY, May 14, 2024
/CNW/ - The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ)
and the Fondation du MNBAQ, in collaboration with the RBC
Foundation, their valued financial partner since 2013, are proud to
contribute to the recognition and effervescence of the Québec
contemporary art scene and have announced the five new recipients
of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award:
Eruoma Awashish,
Rémi Belliveau,
Michelle Lacombe, Anne-Marie Proulx,
and Santiago Tamayo Soler.
A jury selected the artists from diverse backgrounds based on
the excellence, sustained nature, and relevance of their work. The
recipients are being announced this year and will benefit from
outstanding visibility at a group exhibition to be held from
February 13 to April 21, 2025
at the MNBAQ in addition to receiving an individual cash award of
$10 000. "As one of the flagship
projects of the RBC Emerging Artists program, the MNBAQ
Contemporary Art Award enables us to pursue this rewarding
adventure with the MNBAQ. The RBC Foundation is pleased to
contribute to perpetuating this unique award in Québec and to know
that we are making a striking difference in the careers of Québec
artists," noted Nicolas
Audet-Renoux, Regional Vice-President, Quebec, Beauce, Quebec Central and Mauricie,
at RBC Royal Bank. "The MNBAQ and the Fondation du MNBAQ are
facilitating opportunities for artists to draw closer to the
public, thereby allowing them to make themselves known and achieve
recognition. We are convinced that the forthcoming edition will be
a resounding success and congratulate the new prize-winners."
A dynamic selection
The jury sought to represent broad artistic experience through
intentionally eclectic choices. The diversity of the approaches
adopted by these artists is equalled only by their respective
careers and practices, including prints, video games, photography,
performance, body art, and music.
A jury comprising reputable Québec contemporary art specialists
chose the five winners: Anne D'Amours McDonald, President and CEO
of the Foire en art actuel de Québec, Mike
Patten, an artist and Director of BACA, Caroline Loncol Daigneault, an independent
curator, Cheryl Sim, Director
General and Commissioner, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, and
Michèle Thériault, an independent curator. Bernard Lamarche, Curator of Contemporary Art
(2000 to the present) at the MNBAQ, chaired the jury.
A monograph will be published
devoted to the winner, whose works the MNBAQ will
acquire
Moreover, during the exhibition, a second jury will convene to
determine a winner among the five finalist exhibitors in 2024. A
monograph devoted to the artist's work will be published in 2026
and the MNBAQ will acquire the artist's works for its
collection.
Profile of the five winners
The 2025 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.
Eruoma Awashish
The Atikamekw artist Eruoma Awashish holds a BA in
Interdisciplinary Arts from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and since 2023 has been pursuing an
MA in visual arts at the same university. Her artistic approach
seeks to create spaces for dialogue to facilitate the understanding
of First Nations culture. Euroma Awashish has lived in the
Opitciwan, Wemotaci, and
Mashteuiatsh communities and has a
keen sense of belonging to her Indigenous culture. Her work speaks
of métissage and metamorphosis and is imbued with spirituality,
symbolism, and syncretism. She has exhibited her works since 2007
at various venues. In 2018, she participated in BACA (Contemporary
Native Art Biennial) and presented an installation at the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts. More recently, her work was exhibited at the
Biennale Révélations 2023 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Her work will be exhibited in 2024 at
the Art Souterrain Festival in Montréal and at the permanent
exhibition Le Québec autrement dit at the Musée de la
civilisation de Québec.
Rémi Belliveau*
Interdisciplinary artist and Acadian musician Rémi
Belliveau is a native of Belliveau-Village in the Memramcook Valley in
New Brunswick, an Acadian hamlet
situated on Mi'kma'ki, an unceded ancestral territory of the
Mi'kmaq people. Since 2012, their work has been presented at
several events, group exhibitions and solo exhibitions, including
the Sobey Award exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada for which they were a finalist for the
Atlantic region. In parallel to their artistic practice, they
co-curated the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton from 2014 to 2018 and lectured at the
Université de Moncton in 2017.
They have contributed texts to Canadian Art magazine.
Acadian cultural heritage and the fiction underpinning the
construction of the founding narratives are at the heart of their
practice. Rémi Belliveau's artistic work seeks to deconstruct and
reprogram the foundations, structures, and imaginative world of the
Acadian culture to which they belong with the intention of
cultivating the capacity for (self)analysis and critical faculties.
They were longlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award (Atlantic
region). The artist lives and works in Montréal.
Michelle Lacombe
Michelle
Lacombe lives and works in Montréal. Since
obtaining her BFA from Concordia
University in 2006 she has developed a unique body-based
practice that is located at the intersection of visual arts and
performance. Her work has been shown in Canada, the USA, and Europe in the context of performance events,
exhibitions, and colloquiums. She received the 2015 Bourse Plein
Sud and exhibited her work at the Art Encounters Contemporary Art
Biennial in Romania in 2017. Her
practice as an artist is paralleled by a commitment to supporting
action art and other undisciplined practices. She is currently the
director of VIVA! Art Action. By means of various alterations of
her body such as tattooing or scarification, she calls into
question the representation of white women's bodies and the
archetypes linked to feminine gender through a historic and
cultural perspective. Her work is characterized by a material
simplicity, conceptual precision, corporal intensity, and assuredly
feminist perspective.
Anne-Marie
Proulx
Anne-Marie
Proulx draws mainly by means of photography on our
conversations with the territories. She creates poetic universes
that concern the simultaneously individual and collective links
that we maintain with our environments. Her current projects
reflect in particular on the reciprocal links to be created or
maintained with living beings and the natural spaces around us, a
reflection that hinges on the sharing of ideas and perspectives,
especially through Innu-Québec friendship and various collaborative
approaches. She holds an MA in Art History from Concordia University, where she also completed a
BFA in Studio Arts after a year of attending NSCAD University.
Engaged in her community, she has been working since 2014 as
Codirector of VU, centre de diffusion et de production de la
photographie. She lives and works between Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies and Québec City, along
the great river where she grew up and whose shores the Wendat,
Wolastoqiyik, Innu, Abenaki, and Atikamekw have frequented for
thousands of years.
Santiago Tamayo
Soler
Santiago Tamayo
Soler was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1990. He is a Montréal based
multidisciplinary artist working in video, with a background in
performance art and film. He holds a BFA in Studio Arts from
Concordia University. The artist is
interested in world-building and juxtaposing digitally built
locations with archival footage. Through the use of multiple
narrative devices, Santiago Tamayo
Soler proposes an eco-political examination of Latin America from a diasporic perspective,
giving a home to immigrant and queer stories that suggest a radical
futuristic fantasy. He has presented his works at the Canadian
Cultural Centre in Paris, Trinity
Square Video in Toronto, the
Chromatic Festival in Montréal, and the Bradley Ertaskiran Gallery
in Montréal. He is one of the recipients of the 2023 EDAA Emerging
Digital Artists Award presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square
Video. Santiago Tamayo Soler is
currently artist in residence at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
as part of the 2024 Impressions artist residency.
A noteworthy Québec distinction
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
recognize and disseminate contemporary art among the general public
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 the RBC Foundation to
the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Fondation du
MNBAQ, the work of four Québec artists has achieved outstanding
recognition: Diane Morin
(2015), Carl Trahan (2017),
Numa Amun (2019), and
Stanley Février (2021). In
2023, five artists were chosen: Maria
Ezcurra, Anahita
Norouzi,
Celia Perrin Sidarous,
Eve Tagny and
Sara A.Tremblay.
The RBC Foundation is a
committed partner
RBC recognizes that many artists struggle to achieve the
recognition they need to succeed. Since 2007, under the RBC
Emerging Artists program, RBC has supported organizations that
offer artists an opportunity to advance their careers in the visual
arts, music, theatre, dance, literature, and cinema.
The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is granted every two years
through a remarkable partnership between the MNBAQ and the RBC
Foundation. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
is a government corporation subsidized by the Ministère de la
Culture et des Communications du Québec.
SOURCE Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec