News Releases - 2006
Steve Reinke wins Bell Canada Award in Video Art
Ottawa, December 7, 2006 – The Canada Council for the Arts and Bell Canada announced today that Steve Reinke of Toronto is the winner of the 2006 Bell Canada Award in Video Art.
Continuing its tradition of patronage of the arts, Bell Canada provides the Canada Council with an annual gift to fund the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art. The $10,000 prize has been awarded annually since 1991 for exceptional contribution by a video artist or artists to the advancement of video art in Canada and to the development of video practices (videotapes, installations or web-based video art). Steve Reinke joins the ranks of previous winners including Chantal duPont, Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert, Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour, Paul Wong, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, Sara Diamond, Luc Bourdon, Vera Frenkel, General Idea, and Nelson Henricks.
Steve Reinke was selected by a peer assessment committee made up of these professional video artists: Diane Dickert (Calgary), Richard Fung (Toronto) and Jan Peacock (Halifax). He was selected from a list of finalists recommended by a nominating committee consisting of Brigitte Nadeau (Montreal), Kim Tomczak (Toronto) and Elspeth Sage (Vancouver). Mr. Reinke’s prize presentation will be held at Birch Libralato, located at 129 Tecumseth Street in Toronto (one block west of Bathurst, one block south of Queen) on Saturday, January 13, 2007 between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
In awarding the prize to Steve Reinke, the assessment committee said: “Steve Reinke is one of the most influential artists currently working in video. With the first installments of The Hundred Videos in the early 1990’s he led a generation away from the studio into a new conceptual fiction. But Mr. Reinke’s contribution goes beyond his important tapes, he is a committed teacher and he has edited and co-edited several important media arts anthologies.”
Steve Reinke
Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his single channel videos, which have been screened, exhibited and collected worldwide. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Guelph and York University, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from NSCAD University. The Hundred Videos — Mr. Reinke’s work as a young artist — was completed in 1996, several years ahead of schedule. Since then he has completed many short single channel works and has had several solo exhibitions/screenings, in various venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), The Power Plant (Toronto), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Argos Festival (Brussels), Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate (London).
Mr. Reinke serves as mentor to many young and emerging artists. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Western Ontario (London), CalArts (California) and the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). He is currently Associate Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois). He has published many catalogue essays, program notes, theoretical musings and reviews. A book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing, was recently published by Coach House. He co-edited several anthologies: By the Skin of Their Tongues: Artist Video Scripts (with Nelson Henricks), Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video (with Tom Taylor) and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman).
Mr. Reinke’s video work is an extension of literature, focusing on the voice and performance. His video essays often feature first-person monologues in an ironic/satiric mode. Where earlier work was often concerned with an interrogation of desire and subjectivity, more recent work, collected under the umbrella of Final Thoughts, concerns the limits of things: discourse, experience, events, thought. His single channel work is distributed in Canada by Vtape and he is represented by Birch Libralato Gallery in Toronto.
General information
The Canada Council for the Arts, which will celebrate 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 over 100 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 Killam Prizes, the Killam Research Fellowships, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.