Laiwan and Hazel Meyer receive 2023 VIVA Awards, while Daina Augaitis wins Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize
Visual artists recognized by Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation work across disciplines, while Augaitis is best-known for her long tenure as Vancouver Art Gallery chief curator
Daina Augaitis (Photo by Rachel Topham), Hazel Meyer, and Laiwan.
THIS YEAR’S VIVA Awards go to Vancouver artists Laiwan and Hazel Meyer. Funded by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, the $15,000 juried prizes recognize outstanding accomplishment and commitment from mid-career artists.
In addition, the foundation also announced today that longtime former Vancouver Art Gallery chief curator Daina Augaitis is receiving the biennial Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize. The $15,000 prize recognizes excellence in the field of curating in the visual arts.
VIVA winner Laiwan is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose socially, culturally, and environmentally engaged art includes performance, photography, drawing, video, installation, memes, web projects, and audio works, as well as research, mapping, and interactive public art projects. Since the early 1990s, Laiwan has been, she says, “investigating and developing decolonial practices, with an aspiration to identify what is noncolonial.” More recently, she has been concerned with biodiversity, human impacts on natural ecosystems, and the presence around us of non-human species. Laiwan often collaborates with other artists on cross-cultural and public art projects, attuning herself to local and to ecological practices.
Laiwan’s Fountain, The Wall at the CBC Plaza, from the FOUNTAIN: the source or origin of anything project.
Her work includes How Water Remembers, first installed in the group exhibition Rivers Have Mouths at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden; the project speculates on the cultural and biological effects of future sea-level rise in what is now Vancouver’s Chinatown and what were once the False Creek mud flats. Working with cinematographer John Fukushima, Laiwan also directed the eight-minute film Pandemia – The Movie for display on Emily Carr University of Art and Design’s outdoor Urban Screen; the dreamlike images and ideas around aliens and “interbeings” allude to urban development, climate crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Talonbooks published TENDER, a collection of Laiwan’s words and images that serve as “field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires.” Other recent works and exhibits include Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists, at The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in 2022; How Water Remembers, at Vancouvers Massy Arts in 2021; and Fountain, The Wall at the CBC Plaza, commissioned by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.
Laiwan was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1961, her family emigrating to Canada in 1977. After that, the artist graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1983 (founding Vancouver’s Or Gallery the same year), receiving an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts in 1999.
Hazel Meyer’s Where Once Stood A Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter, 2017. Photo by Henry Chan
Muscle Panic, 2021, installa1on view in The Art of Sport at Copenhagen Contemporary. Photo by David Stjernholm
Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the relationship between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Through installation, performance, video, and text, she “seeks to recover the queer aesthetics, politics and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness,” she says. Many of Meyer’s text-based artworks, which span books, banners, and badges, are hand-drawn in a distinctive style whose playfulness belies the seriousness of their content.
Recent works include A People’s History of Prednisone, a short video-text in which the artist hand-titles the cover of a book that doesn’t exist but should; Muscle Panic, a mixed-media installation and performance that appeared in The Art of Sport exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary; wEEPING cONCRETE, a 40-foot-high scaffolding built beneath Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway that featured performers unfurling and dropping large banners of hand-drawn text before a seated audience; and The Weight of Inheritance, a performance that took as its point of departure odd pieces of marble found in the house of the late artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland.
Meyer holds a BFA in studio art from Concordia University, Montreal, and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from the Ontario College of Art & Design University, Toronto. She has exhibited, installed, screened, and performed her artworks across Canada, the U.S., Europe, and the U.K. and has produced public-art projects in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Boston, and London.
Dana Augaitis has contributed to numerous catalogues and books.
Augaitis, meanwhile, oversaw many critically lauded shows as chief curator and associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery between 1996 and 2017. Highlights included exhibits by Vikky Alexander, Geoffrey Farmer, Douglas Coupland, Song Dong, Rebecca Belmore, Brian Jungen, Paul Wong, Nancy Spero, Stan Douglas, and Ann Hamilton. She also curated and co-curated group exhibitions on subjects spanning post-war craft and design in B.C., mash-up culture, Surrealism, and body politics, and she oversaw the revival of the gallery’s survey exhibitions of contemporary Vancouver art. Augaitis was also responsible for bringing greater diversity to contemporary art programs and expanding the profile of the gallery nationally and internationally. She doubled the size of the VAG’s permanent collection during her tenure and inaugurated its Offsite and Asian Art programs. More recently, she served as interim director at the VAG between 2019 and 2020.
Elsewhere, Augaitis has contributed essays and interviews to books and exhibition catalogues that include Gathie Falk: Revelations, Jan Wade: Soul Power, Modern in the Making: Post-war Craft and Design in British Columbia, Vikky Alexander: Extreme Beauty, and Ben Reeves: Floating among Phantoms.
Previously, Augaitis held curatorial and directorial positions at Banff’s Walter Phillips Gallery, and Vancouver’s Western Front and the Convertible Showroom. Among her honours are the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence, the Canadian Museums Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research, and the Emily Award from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She has taken on freelance curatorial projects throughout her career, including those for institutions in Toronto, New York, Seattle, and Madrid. Augaitis was named Canadian commissioner for the Johannesburg Biennale (1995), the Sydney Biennial (2000), and the Bienal de São Paulo (2002); and was curator of the Vancouver Pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Established in 1988, the VIVA Awards are funded by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. Serving on the independent VIVA jury this year were Lyse Lemieux, Jenn Jackson, Elliott Ramsey, Christian Vistan and Corry Wyngaarden.
The jury for the Balkind award, which is made possible through the Estate of Abraham Rogatnick and is administered by the Shadbolt foundation, was Zoë Chan, Makiko Hara and Ian Wallace.
The public ceremony honouring the recipients will be announced in the coming months.
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