News
Browse

Congratulations to Alumni + Faculty Longlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award

Saa 2018
Sobey Art Award
This post is 5 years old and may be out of date.

By Roxanne Toronto

Posted on | Updated

The Sobey Art Award is the preeminent prize for Canadian artists 40 and under.

Four members of the ECU community have been longlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award, the preeminent prize for Canadian artists 40 and under. Celebrating some of this country’s most exciting young artists, the award provides significant financial and professional recognition.

And this year, the Award has doubled — with a top prize of $100,000 issued to the winner and $25,000 to each of the four finalists. The remaining longlisted artists will each receive $2,000.

Join us in congratulating the Emily Carr longlisted candidates, all hailing from the West Coast and Yukon region:

  • Hannah Jickling + Helen Reed (Sessional Faculty)

  • Jeneen Frei Njootli (2012)

  • Krista Belle Stewart (2006)


The finalists – one from each region in Canada - will be announced on May 29. The National Gallery of Canada hosts a special event on 14 to announce the winner. Past award recipients include ECU alumni Jeremy Shaw, Brian Jungen, and Nadia Myre. Stay tuned!

Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling have been collaborating since 2006. Their projects take shape as public installations, social situations and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed matter, and artists’ multiples.

They are currently fascinated with the contact high intrinsic to collaborative research, especially in their recent projects with children. Jickling and Reed are recipients of the 2016 Ian Wallace Award for Teaching Excellence (Emily Carr University of Art & Design); a 2017 Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Public Art (City of Vancouver); and a 2018 VIVA Award (Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts).


Jeneen Frei Njootli is an artist (Vuntut Gwitchin) and co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective, who has been living and working as an uninvited guest on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, Sto:lo and Tsleil­Waututh territories for a decade. In her interdisciplinary practice, she uses media such as performance, sound, textiles, collaboration and workshops.

For her recent Media Arts Residency at the Western Front in Vancouver, she hosted a free workshop on how to create and update Wikipedia pages for Indigenous women artists. In 2017, Frei Njootli was the recipient of the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize, and in 2016, she won the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists. After graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2012, Frei Njootli completed her MFA at University of British Columbia in 2017.


Krista Belle Stewart’s work engages with the complexities of archival material through processes that allow for both intimacy and coincidence, as well as for the atemporal meeting of actors across time. Working with video, photography, design, ephemera and textiles, Stewart straddles the gaps between personal and institutional histories through transparent mediation.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; House of World Cultures, Berlin; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Mercer Union, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, and Western Front, Vancouver; and Esker Foundation, Calgary. Born in Kamloops, Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation and lives and works in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from Bard College.