Announcing our 2018 Honorary Doctorate + Emily Award Recipients

Rebecca Belmore studied at Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) from 1984–1986. Belmore is a multi-disciplinary artist whose works evoke the connections between bodies, land, and language and are firmly rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities. Since 1987, Belmore has exhibited her work at national and international venues. Her solo shows include: Rebecca Belmore: Rising to the Occasion, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2008);The Named and the Unnamed, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC (2002); and Fountain (2005) at the 51st Venice Biennale.

Her group exhibitions include: Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, Niigata Prefecture, Japan (2015); Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Art Museum, New York (2007); Land, Spirit, Power, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON (1992); and Creation or Death: We will Win, Havana Biennial, Cuba (1991).

Belmore was a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2013, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2009, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2005.

Kim Gordon studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name ‘Design Office’ took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. For the past thirty years Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (XGirl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director).

Gordon’s artworks include the ongoing ‘Noise Painting’ series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; a series of paintings depicting the names of contemporary galleries and gallery owners; works from the untitled ‘From The Boyfriend’ series – Rorschachlike images painted on used denim skirts; ‘Twitter Paintings’ sourced from the Twitter streams of ‘GIRLS’ producer Jenni Konner, critic Jerry Saltz, and artist Richard Prince among others; and her ‘Wreath Paintings’, which employ the decorative folk forms as stencils to produce vertiginous colour abstractions. An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in her most recent work, canvases are treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of de- and re-composition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence.

Angela Grauerholz, artist/photographer and graphic designer, has been Full professor at the École de design at the Université du Québec à Montréal until 2017, where she has taught typography and photography since 1988. From 2008 to 2012 she directed the Centre de design at UQAM. Her photographic work has been exhibited and collected widely (Canada, USA, Europe), and she has participated in many international events of distinction including the Sydney Biennale (1990), documenta IX (1992), the Carnegie International (1995) and the Montréal Biennale (2004).

In 2006, Grauerholz was awarded Québec’s Prix Paul-Émile Borduas for her accomplishments in the arts, in 2014 she received the Canada Council’s Governor General Award in Visual and Media Arts, and in 2015 the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award. Along with her purely photographic work, she has worked on different types of photographic archives, addressing notions of memory, of space and place, as well photographic representation.

Pierre Hébert is a former animator at the National Film Board of Canada where he directed over twenty animation shorts and a feature (La Plante humaine, best Quebec feature award 1996). Hébert is now an independent artist and filmmaker. Since 2001, he has traveled the world with his musician colleague Bob Ostertag presenting the Living Cinema live animation performance over 80 times. He has also worked with many other musicians. Pierre Hébert has collaborated with dance companies in New York, Montreal and France, and has published two books and many articles on cinema and animation. He has also pursued a career as a visual artist (drawings, installations, web projects).

Currently, Hébert’s main project is a new series of films Places and Monuments for which he received the prestigious career grant for cinema from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec in 2012. In 2005, he was the recipient of the “Albert Tessier” cinema award from the Quebec government for lifetime achievement, and in 2017, he received a special career award from the Tehran International Animation Festival.

Tsēmā Igharas (formerly Tamara Skubovius) is an interdisciplinary artist and a member of the Tāłtān First Nation. She uses Potlatch methodology to create conceptual artwork influenced by her mentorship in Northwest Coast Formline Design at K’saan (2005/06), her studies in visual culture and time in the mountains. She has a Bachelor's degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2011) and graduated from the Interdisciplinary Master's in Art, Media and Design program at OCAD U showing her thesis work, LAND|MINE that connects materials to mine sites and bodies to the land. Tsēmā has shown and performed in various places in Canada, and internationally in Chiapas, Mexico; Asheville, USA; and Santiago, Chile.