News Releases - 2005
Rebecca Belmore, Rae Bowhay, Lois Brown, Lynn Coady, Jean Pierre Gauthier, Irene Loughlin and Jane Siberry win Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards
Ottawa, August 30, 2005 – Media artist Rebecca Belmore, choreographer and dancer Rae Bowhay, director and actor Lois Brown, writer Lynn Coady, sculptor Jean Pierre Gauthier, multidisciplinary artist Irene Loughlin and singer Jane Siberry have been named the winners of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards for 2005.
The annual awards, worth $15,000 each, recognize outstanding mid-career artists in the seven disciplines funded by the Canada Council: music, theatre, dance, visual arts, media arts, writing and publishing and Inter-arts. The Prizes were created using funds from a generous bequest made to the Canada Council by the late Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton.
The seven Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award recipients were chosen through a process which involved nominations by the Grants to Professional Artists peer assessment committees during the 2004-05 fiscal year. The winning candidates were those considered to be the most outstanding mid-career artists of those nominated.
Rebecca Belmore, Media Arts
Born in Ontario, Rebecca Belmore is an Anishinabekwe artist, currently working out of Vancouver. Ms. Belmore’s work has long addressed history, place and identity through the media of sculpture, installation, video and performance.
Last June, Ms. Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the Venice Biennale of Visual Art. She has produced installations and performances internationally since 1987, including Creation or Death, We Will Win, at the Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba (1991) and Vigil, at the Aboriginal Arts Festival, Vancouver (2003). Her installations have been in numerous group exhibitions: Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1995), Liaisons, Power Plant, Toronto, and Houseguests, Art Gallery of Ontario (2001). She represented Canada at the Sydney Biennale, in Australia in 1998, in a group exhibition format. Ms. Belmore recently received the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation. She had a residency with Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in Winnipeg, in September of 2004.
Rae Bowhay, Dance
Originally from Alberta, Rae Bowhay began studying dance at the age of seven. She started her contemporary dance studies at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, continued with workshops in Scotland, Spain and San Francisco, and finally settled in Los Angeles for three years to study with Charles Edmondson. There she began working with Collage Dance Theatre and Christensen Dance Co. while initiating her own choreographic pursuits. After another year of study in New York City, she moved to Montreal where she ignited another passion, flamenco, and with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, was able to study in Spain with such renowned flamenco artists such as Juana Amaya, Javier Cruz, Belen Maya, and Domingo Ortega.
Ms. Bowhay’s expertise, polyvalence and remarkable interpretive skills make her one of Canada's most creative and surprising dance artists. She has performed extensively throughout Quebec, Western Canada and recently in Scotland, for the Edinburgh Festival with guitarist Ricardo Garcia. She has been developing new works, in part funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, with musician Martin Trudel for the past eight years under the name SaSaSa, which have been presented in Montreal at Tangente, Studio 303, Théâtre du Rideau Vert, Théâtre de la Verdure and Club Soda.
Lois Brown, Theatre
Born in Corner Brook, Lois Brown is a seventh generation Newfoundlander. Educated in Drama at the University of Alberta, Ms. Brown returned to St. John’s where she has directed over thirty new works by Newfoundland artists, served as Artistic Animateur of RCA Theatre Company, and curator for Neighbourhood Dance Works. Ms. Brown also works in other performance-driven mediums, including film. With co-creator Barry Newhook she wrote, directed and performed in the first digital feature made in Newfoundland, The Bingo Robbers (2000, producer Dana Warren). It won several awards including Best Original Screenplay at The Atlantic Film Festival and Best Feature at the Toronto International DV Film Festival.
Ms. Brown’s current projects include a public installation/performance called stringart, a new play titled Will the Boy on the Raft Please Come to Shore and her research in comedy with The White Hags. This spring, she was recognized for her contribution to the arts in Newfoundland with an Artist Achievement Award. This fall, she will be artist-in-residence at Playwright’s Workshop Montreal. Ms. Brown lives in St. John’s, NL, with her daughter Olivia.
Lynn Coady, Writing and Publishing
Lynn Coady was born on Cape Breton Island, and has a BA from Carleton University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Ms. Coady is the author of the novel Saints of Big Harbour. Her first novel, Strange Heaven, was nominated for the 1998 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.
Ms. Coady has also published the award-winning short story collection Play the Monster Blind, and in 2003 she edited the anthology Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada. She is an essayist and journalist; she wrote a regular column for the Globe and Mail and she also has been a senior editor with Adbusters Magazine. Her third novel, Mean Boy, will be published by Doubleday Canada in March 2006. Ms. Coady currently lives in Edmonton.
Jean Pierre Gauthier, Visual Arts
Jean-Pierre Gauthier was born in Matane, Quebec, and has lived and worked in Montreal since 1986. He received an MFA. from UQAM in 1995. Mr. Gauthier has participated in several group shows in Norway, Spain, France, the United States and Canada. Over the past decade, his solo sound installations have been seen and heard at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee, the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1998, Mr. Gauthier has taken part in musical events with such artists as Michel F. Coté, Diane Labrosse, Martin Tétreault, Jean Derome and Mirko Sabatini. He has presented music and sound installation projects in Italy, the United States, in Canada at the Festival de musique actuelle in Victoriaville, the Openear Festival in Kitchener-Waterloo and Mois Multi in Quebec City. He received the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2004. Mr. Gauthier is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.
Mr. Gauthier's moving sound installations express an overall lust in creating disorder. He takes everyday objects out of their context, reassembles them and empowers them with their own locomotion. The work then created re-charges the viewer with a sense of playfulness. Most of Mr. Gauthier's installations are made of objects that can be readily identified, thus retaining an objective quality that does not trigger emotional or cultural associations.
Irene Loughlin, Inter-Arts
Irene Loughlin is a performance artist who also works in the areas of installation and video. She has studied at the Ontario College of Art and Simon Fraser University, and has attended the NSCAD studio program in Tribeca, New York. She has presented her work in various national and international contexts including the work light as a feather/heavy as lead for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo and the Klaus Steinmetz Gallery (San Jose, Costa Rica), The Western Front, Grunt Gallery, Xeno Gallery, Gallery Gachet, and The Society for Disability Art and Culture (Vancouver), 7a11d Festival (Toronto), Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax) and Projet/Projo - Studio 303 (Montreal).
Ms. Loughlin has produced several works for the Vancouver Performance Art Biennial including the current work NADIA (2005). She has been a member of the desmedia collective over the past four years, a group of artists that facilitates peer learning workshops in video and editing skills for residents of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Ms. Loughlin was born in Hamilton and lives in Vancouver.
Jane Siberry, Music
Jane Siberry was born in Toronto. She studied music and microbiology at the University of Guelph and earned an Honours B.Sc. in Microbiology. While she was a student, Ms. Siberry began performing at the local coffeehouse where she also worked as a waitress; ultimately, she used her tip money to fund her 1981 self-titled debut LP, a spartan offering spotlighting her ethereal vocal navigations.
Three years later, Ms. Siberry resurfaced with No Borders Here, a collection highlighted by Mimi on the Beach, an underground Canadian hit. The critical and commercial success of 1985's evocative The Speckless Sky brought her to the attention of Warner/Reprise for 1988's The Walking. In 1989 she released Bound By the Beauty, followed in 1993 by her most eclectic and ambitious work yet, When I Was a Boy. In May 1996, Ms. Siberry formed her own record company, Sheeba; Teenager, her first self-released effort, followed a month later. The live New York Trilogy made up of Child – Music For The Christmas Season, Tree – Music For Films and Forests and Lips – Music For Saying It, captured three nights at The Bottom Line in New York and finally saw the light of day in 1999. Hush appeared the next year, showcasing a collection of traditional American and Celtic compositions. City (2001) marked rare material and collaborations with the likes of Joe Jackson, Nigel Kennedy, Hector Zazou and others.
General information
The Canada Council for the Arts, in addition to its principal role of promoting and fostering the arts in Canada, administers and awards more than 100 prizes and fellowships in the arts and humanities. Other music awards include the Sylva Gelber Foundation Award, the Virginia Parker Prize and loans of fine stringed instruments through the Musical Instrument Bank. Other noteworthy prizes administered by the Council are the Canada Council Molson Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, the Killam Prizes and the Killam Research Fellowships, Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music and the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.
For more information about these awards, including nomination procedures, contact Janet Riedel Pigott, Acting Director of Endowments and Prizes, at (613) 566-4414 or 1 800 263 5588, ext. 5041; or Danielle Sarault, Acting Endowments and Prizes Officer, at (613) 566 4414 or 1-800-263-5588, ext. 4116.
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