Artists Gabi Dao (BFA 2014), Sheena Hoszko (BFA 2003) and Emily Neufeld (BFA 2013) are among the 25 artists nominated to the longlist for this year’s prestigious Sobey Art Award.

A distinguished jury composed of one representative from each of Canada’s five regions — the Atlantic Provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies and the North, and the West Coast and Yukon — as well as one international juror will shortlist a finalist from each region.

One overall winner will receive a $100,000 prize, while $25,000 will go to each of the four other shortlisted artists. All five shortlisted artists will also be featured in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada during the fall of 2021. The remaining 20 longlisted artists will each receive $10,000.

“The unprecedented number of first-time longlisted artists resonates loudly with the Sobey Art Foundation’s commitment to amplifying new voices,” Rob Sobey, chair of the Sobey Art Foundation, said in a statement. “I am pleased to see such an exciting array of emerging artists … We look forward to celebrating these exceptional artists and contemporary art for all that it contributes to society.”

Gabi Dao

Gabi Dao’s practice explores counter-memory, multiple truths, and blurred temporalities through sculpture, installation, moving image and sound. She thinks through the mud of experiential entanglements, in opposition to the capitalist veneer of cause and effect. Her work has been presented at numerous galleries and festivals, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Audain Gallery, Images Festival, the Terrain Biennial, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Gabi is based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, where she also co-stewards the DIY studio and project space Duplex.

Sheena Hoszko

Sheena Hoszko is a sculptor, anti-prison organizer, and Polish settler living and working in Tio'tia:ke/Mooniyaang/Montréal. Her art practice examines the power dynamics and violence of geographical, architectural, and psychological sites, informed by her family's experiences with incarceration, the military, and mental illness. Employing strategies of post-minimalism to draw attention to the politics of space and material, Hoszko primarily uses rented and reusable materials, which re-enter the world as non-art after a project is complete.

Hoszko has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, A Space in Toronto, and La Ferme du Buisson in Paris. She has held residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, La Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and Villa Magdalena K in Germany. Her writing has appeared in M.I.C.E Magazine and Free Inside: The Life and Work of Peter Collins.

Emily Neufeld

Emily Neufeld lives and works on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam peoples. Her practice investigates place, and the layers of memory and psychic history that accumulate in our material world. She is committed to examining her own Mennonite and Scottish colonial histories towards understanding her relationship to this place as Indigenous land.

Recent solo exhibitions include Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby at the Richmond Art Gallery (2020), and Before Demolition at the Burrard Arts Foundation (2017), both in Greater Vancouver, Before Demolition: Tides at Eyelevel in Halifax (2019) and Motherlands at The Pole in The Hague, Netherlands (2019). Neufeld has created and participates in community sharing gardens, and sees land as fundamental to her research process. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2013.