News Releases - 2007
Canada Council announces winners of the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards
Ottawa, October 3, 2007 – Interdisciplinary artist Daniel Barrow, author Jocelyn Boisvert, celtic and jazz singer Teresa Doyle, media artist Zoe Leigh Hopkins, director and poet/performer Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, dancer Chanti Wadge and BGL, composed of sculptors Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, Nicolas Laverdière, are the winners of the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch‑Staunton Awards.
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 interdisciplinary arts. The Prizes were created using funds from a generous bequest made by the late Victor Martyn Lynch‑Staunton to the Canada Council.
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 2006‑2007 fiscal year. The winning candidates are considered the most outstanding mid-career artists of those nominated.
Images of the winners can be downloaded from the Canada Council image gallery.
Daniel Barrow – Interdisciplinary arts
Daniel Barrow is a Winnipeg-based media artist, working in performance, video and installation. Since 1993, Mr. Barrow has used an overhead projector to relay ideas and short narratives. Specifically, he creates and adapts comic book narratives to a “manual” form of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on mylar transparencies. Mr. Barrow variously refers to this practice as “graphic performance”, “live illustration”, or manual animation”.
Mr. Barrow has toured extensively throughout Canada and abroad. Barrow has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), New Langton Arts (San Francisco), and The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). His drawings are also exhibited widely and are represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Mr. Barrow is currently working on a new performance entitled, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry which he plans to tour in 2008.
Jocelyn Boisvert – Writing and Publishing
A native of Sherbrooke, Quebec, Jocelyn Boisvert has written for children for the past ten years. His first novel, Les 101 peurs du petit Robert (Héritage, 1998) was nominated for the Prix Cécile‑Gagnon. La mauvaise fortune du brigadier (Vents d’Ouest, 2003) was a finalist for the Prix Hackmatack. Un livre sans histoire (Soulières éditeur, 2004), a novel where the reader becomes the narrator of their own adventures, was included in the Sélection White Ravens. In a similar vein, Ne lisez pas ce livre (Soulières éditeur, 2006) describes the fantastic misadventures of an adolescent contaminated by the reading virus after being bitten by a book.
After a venture into theatre, literature studies at the Université de Sherbrooke and scriptwriting at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the author lived in Nunavik before moving to Îles-de-la-Madeleine, where he is raising a family and working as a video artist.
His innovative approach to young readers has earned him several creation grants from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts, and a number of his novels for adolescents will be published over the coming years.
Teresa Doyle – Music
Prince Edward Island native Teresa Doyle has toured extensively in North America, Europe and Japan. Ms. Doyle has taken her Celtic and jazz infused music to countless festivals and concert venues including: The Mariposa, Winnipeg and Vancouver Folk Festivals, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the 92nd Street ‘Y’ in Manhattan, The Lemon Tree in Scotland, the Salisbury Arts Centre in England, and the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. She also presented voice workshops in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. Ms. Doyle spent seven years on the Montreal jazz scene in the eighties before returning to live on Prince Edward Island.
Her recordings have met with critical acclaim across North America and the British Isles. With her three very successful Celtic children’s recordings, she created “adult/child crossover music”, according to Dirty Linen. They garnered numerous awards including two East Coast Music Awards, A Parent's Choice Recommended award, and two JUNO nominations.
She credits much of her recording success to her longstanding musical relationship with producer Oliver Schroer. This partnership allows her to continue to live in rural Prince Edward Island, and still work with some of Canada’s finest musicians.
Zoe Leigh Hopkins – Media arts
Zoe Leigh Hopkins is a writer and director. She works in drama and loves to laugh but so far has not managed to write a comedy. Her short film Prayer for a Good Day premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. That same year, she was honoured to be a Fellow in the prestigious Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, workshopping her script Cherry Blossoms, which is now in development.
Ms. Leigh Hopkins also wrote and directed One-eyed Dogs are Free, which was nominated for Best Short at the American Indian Film Festival and received Honorable Mention at the imagineNATIVE Film Festival in 2006. Ms. Leigh Hopkins is currently writing a play for the Children’s Theater in Minneapolis. This fall, she will travel to Iceland to research a new dramatic screenplay. Ms. Leigh Hopkins and her husband Marty live in Vancouver with their baby son Julian.
Ahdri Zhina Mandiela – Theatre
Chosen as the number one theatre artist of 2005 (Now magazine, Toronto), Ahdri Zhina Mandiela is widely known as a director and poet/performer. Her multi-disciplined works include dance choreographies, audio recordings, and the seminal independent film, on/black/stage/women.
Ms. Mandiela is founder and artistic director of the Toronto-based performance art company, b current, and has directed and dramaturged numerous productions for mainstages and school tours, as well as having several scripts produced.
In recognition of innovative years of work as an artist on the Toronto scene, she’s been ‘harolded’ and received both the Luscombe award for mentoring and the prestigious Silver Ticket award from the Dora jury in 2006.
Her most recent stage works include directing Canstage’s 25th anniversary Dream in High Park: a Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Nightwood theatre production of Cast Iron, Trevor Rhone’s Two Can Play for Obsidian Theatre Company, Tightrope Time for black theatre workshop in Montréal, the Burglary for Gamut Production, and the b current and theatre archipelago co-production, Fallen Angel and The Devil Concubine. Ms. Mandiela was also a playwright in residence last season at Canadian Stage Theatre, working on the dub aria playscript, who knew grannie.
Chanti Wadge – Dance
Originally from Vancouver, Chanti Wadge has been working in Montreal as a choreographer and dancer since 2001. Her works have been presented across Canada, and in the Czech Republic, Poland and France, and include the interdisciplinary solos Save Project As: unrehearsed phases of A Becoming Human (2003), and 100 Returnings (2007), video installations, palmpilot (2002), betweenlines (2003) and dawning (2004), full-length choreographies [we]: fieldnotes from the bardo (2005) and [thru]: the stilllife series (2006).
Ms. Wadge has been invited to residencies through Tanzwerkstaat (Berlin), Balleteatro/Danse à Lille (Porto, Portugal), O Vertigo Danse (Montreal) and Le Groupe de la Place Royale (Ottawa). She has also performed internationally for artists such as José Navas, Ginette Laurin, Emmanuel Jouthe, Gioconda Barbuto, Isabelle Van Grimde and Andrew Harwood. For her work she has earned notable year-end media mentions: “the most essential dancer of the year” (Hour, 2004 and Ballet Tanz, 2004), the Dance “tête forte” (Ici, 2004), “Danse Coup de Coeur” (La Presse, 2005) and “Multidisciplinary Talent” (The Year in Review, The Mirror, 2006).
BGL – Visual Art
The BGL collective, made up of sculptors Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière, is based in Quebec. In 1996, the three university friends graduated in visual arts from Université Laval. That same year, they decided to become professional partners and founded BGL.
In their creation projects, the members of BGL delight in straying from the beaten path. They strive to break out of traditional frameworks and bring the human being and art closer together. Their work startles spectators and encourages them to participate in a physical experience. They voice social concerns and take an evocative look at contemporary society.
Individually and collectively, the three partners have taken part in several exhibitions in galleries, artist-run centres and museums. Among them are: Le discours des éléments at the National Gallery of Canada (until the end of January 2008), The marks of my hands at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto (until November 25, 2007), Fun House at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton (currently shown), the elevator at the Artist’s space of New-York (from October 10 to December 27, 2007), Le Canada collectionne at the Royal Museum of Ontario (Starting on October 4) as well as an exhibition at the Canadian Centre in Paris in February 2008.
General information
The Canada Council for the Arts, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2007, is a national arm’s‑length agency created by an Act of Parliament in 1957. In addition to its principal role of promoting and fostering the arts in Canada, the Canada Council administers and awards prizes and fellowships to almost 200 artists and scholars annually in the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural and health sciences, and engineering. Among these are the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, the York Wilson Endowment Award, the Prix de Rome in Architecture and the Killam Prizes.
For more information about these awards, including nomination procedures, contact Janet Riedel Pigott, Acting Director, Endowments and Prizes, at 613‑566‑4414 or 1‑800‑263‑5588, ext. 5041; or Danielle Sarault, Acting Officer, Endowments and Prizes, at 613‑566‑4414 or 1‑800‑263‑5588, ext. 4116.