Portfolio Prize awards five emerging Vancouver artists $6,000 each
The five recipients are Durrah Alsaif, Mathew Andreatta, Manuel Axel Strain, Rebecca Bair, and Bracken Hanuse Corlett
Durrah Alsaif’s Qimas. Courtesy of the artist
Mathew Andreatta works across hand drums and other surfaces. Courtesy of the artist
THE PORTFOLIO PRIZE for emerging artists has announced the five winners of this year’s $6,000 award: Durrah Alsaif, Mathew Andreatta, Manuel Axel Strain, Rebecca Bair, and Bracken Hanuse Corlett.
They were chosen from a shortlist of artists by this year’s jurors (Lisa Baldissera, Nya Lewis, and Elliott Ramsey).
This 2021-2022 prize is an initiative of the 85/5 Visual Arts foundation, founded in 2000 by five internationally celebrated artist friends who graduated from Emily Carr University in 1985: Douglas Coupland, Graham Gillmore, Angela Grossmann, Attila Richard Lukacs, and Derek Root, plus artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who joined the board in 2015. Conceived by Artists for Artists, the Portfolio Prize is meant to encourage the development of young artists through early career support, nurturing future generations of artists and boosting the growth of the region's arts community at large.
Saudi Arabia-born Durrah Alsaif is an interdisciplinary artist who received her BFA in 2017 from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She has displayed her public artwork Qimash in the Stadium/Chinatown Skytrain station as part of the Capture Photography Festival, in collaboration with TransLink. Using photography, performance, sculpture, and installation, Alsaif explores the “ever-changing and malleable conditions based on cultural and socio-political notions in her home country via the lens of a person living in North America”, according to her artist statement.
Rebecca Bair, meanwhile, reimagines the representation of Black women through installations, video, drawing, and photography. “Personal contemplation through experience, ancestry, self or the diasporic community is integral to her practice,” the artist statement notes. “Bair’s use of abstraction and non-figuration intervenes in the history of colonial exclusion, and the colonial imperative to consume images of Otherness. Bair uses signifiers such as hair, skin, and the sun to examine legacies of settler colonialism and slavery, while contributing visualisations of resiliency.”
Rebecca Bair’s mixed-media installation Sky Light, as seen at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Courtesy of the artist
Another winner, Qualicum First Nation artist Mathew Andreatta, works with paint on canvas, traditional hand drums, wood carving, digital design, and more, deepening his understanding of Indigenous art forms as they relate to a contemporary world. “My practice as an artist is informed by my love, appreciation and study of historical pieces left for us by our ancestors and my desire to carry on their expression of identity, strength and history to the generations that come after us,” Andreatta says in an artist statement.
Work by Manuel Axel Strain. Courtesy of the artist
Prize-winner Manuel Axel Strain, a 2Spirit artist whose lineage is Musqueam Simpcw and Syilx, works across performance, land, painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound, and installation. “Although they attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design they prioritize Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and ancestors,” their artist statement reads. They have shown work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, and the UBCO Fina Gallery, and were longlisted for 2022 Sobey Award. Their work explores ancestral and community ties, Indigeneity, labour, resource extraction, gender, and Indigenous medicine and life forces.
And Bracken Hanuse Corlett is a multimedia artist hailing from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. He got his start in theatre and performance, now focusing on digital-media, live-visual installation, performance, and visual arts. He is the co-founder of the Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival and has performed across the country as a member of the audio-visual collective Skookum Sound System. A graduate of the En’owkin Centre of Indigenous Art and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Corlett has studied Northwest Coast art, carving, and design. Works include the experimental video work (dis)Place, produced with the Alternator Gallery in conjunction with Jayce Salloum, about Aboriginal rights and social justice; and Quqva (to drift), an experimental film that features Bracken in a performative audioscape amid drifting images of ocean, shore, big house, and mountains, wearing and becoming the mask. He was a recipient of the 2014 BC Creative Achievement Award for Aboriginal Art.
The 2021-2022 prize is made possible by the fundraising initiative of guest artists Rebecca Belmore, Vikky Alexander, and Dana Claxton, by artists of the board of the 85/5 Foundation, and by collectors and supporters who purchased this 2021 Edition - Artists for Artists limited-edition portfolio.
Bracken Hanuse Corlett’s The Drop, Double projection, digital animation site-specific installation, on view now at the Audain Art Museum’s Out of Control exhibit. Courtesy of the artist
Related Articles
