The Lind Prize

This year’s Capture Photography Festival launches on April 1 in conjunction with the opening reception of the inaugural Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize and exhibition. The prize has been established to support emerging artists working with photography, film, and video. Each year, post-secondary visual arts instructors are invited to nominate a student enrolled in a BFA or MFA program. Shortlisted students have their work exhibited as part of the Lind Prize exhibition. This year’s winner will be selected and announced during the April 1 opening celebration.

The Prize

The Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize is made possible with generous support from Rogers Communications. Rogers made a significant donation to Presentation House Gallery to honour Phil Lind’s forty-five years of service and contribution to the company and the communications industry, and to celebrate his passion for the Vancouver art scene, at the time of his retirement last year.

The 2016 jury includes Stephen Waddell (artist and Emily Carr University of Art + Design faculty member), Helga Pakasaar (Curator, Presentation House Gallery), and Reid Shier (Director/Curator, Presentation House Gallery).

The shortlisted emerging artists for the inaugural prize are:

Kerri Flannigan, University of Victoria
Emily Geen, University of Victoria
Curtis Grahauer, Simon Fraser University
Polina Lasenko, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Brandon Poole, University of Victoria
Anna Shkuratoff, University of Victoria
Vilhelm Sundin, Simon Fraser University
Lauren Tsuyuki, Simon Fraser University

The winner will be awarded $5,000 toward the production of a new work to be included in an exhibition at the future Polygon Gallery in 2017.

The Exhibition

Kerri Flannigan’s stop-motion animation maps the exterior of a now defunct institution for the intellectually disabled, using changes wrought to the building’s facade since the mid nineteenth century as a vocabulary of exclusion to explore the ideological borders between healthy and sick, normal and deviant.

Emily Geen is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the contemporary condition of mediated looking. She purposely works with images that are amateur and ambiguous, using glass and other materials to fragment, obstruct, or otherwise direct our perception of the pictorial content.

Curtis Grahauer’s 16 mm film installation depicts an environment that exemplifies the “super unnatural,” a term coined by the artist to identify the anthropogenic landscape that hides in plain sight, a grey area of obscured human influence between the natural and the naturalized.

Polina Lasenko has photographed television newsreaders from video stills, drawing attention to their status as modern storytellers and to the divide between fact, fiction, and propaganda. A second series connects narratives of the familiar and the familial through the actions of sea, wind, and time, in prints drawn from personal and family archives.

Brandon Poole uses recycled materials to create rough sculptural supports for his meticulous HD videos. In these works, virtuality and materiality collide, as small fluttering movements break the flatness of the surface and trouble the stillness of the image.

Anna Shkuratoff has made a series of videos dealing with the themes of longing and nostalgia in the production of lens-based work. The technical and formal implications of HD video are revealed through subtle interventions into the video plane that encourage close looking.

Vilhelm Sundin’s video installations bring together the sublime and the everyday. In one, a giant moon hovers over the city, familiar but strange. In another, the tiny figure of a man can be seen smoking quietly on an apartment rooftop as smoke blankets the city.

Lauren Tsuyuki’s two recent photographic projects consider the transformative nature of a fold. One series uses the process of folding to break apart narrative and memory, the other to accentuate the division between manual and digital processes.