2009 Sobey Art Award Shortlist Announced

Last week on Friday May 1st, the Curatorial Panel of the 2009 Sobey Art Award announced the names of the five exceptional Canadian artists selected for the 2009 Sobey Art Award Shortlist: For the West Coast and Yukon: Luanne Martineau; the Prairies and The North: Marcel Dzama; Ontario: Shary Boyle; Québec: David Altmejd; and the Atlantic region : Graeme Patterson. To learn more about the shortlisted artists, check out the Sobey Art Award Page on the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia website .

"Faced with the benefit of a uniformly strong selection of candidates,the jury came to a unanimous consensus on this year's shortlist.Addressing both the local and the global, these artists make works that encapsulate materiality and conception, scale and complexity,
representation and irrationality. Each artist shares a depth of commitment to their creation and exploration of idiosyncratic worlds that are real, imagined, and fantastical.”
2009 Curatorial Panel

Selected work from the shortlisted artists will be exhibited by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from September 5 to November 5 of 2009. The winner of the 2009 Sobey Art Award will be announced October 15, 2009.

Members of the Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel include Liz Wylie, Curator, Kelowna Art Gallery; Kitty Scott, Director, Visual Arts - The Banff Centre; Ivan Jurakic, Curator, Cambridge Galleries; Louise Déry, Director, Galerie de l'UQAM; and Terry Graff, Curator & Deputy Director; Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

The Sobey Art Award, created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation is an annual prize given to an artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery. A total
of $70,000 in prize money is awarded : $50,000 to the winner and $5,000 to each of the other four finalists. The Sobey Art Award and accompanying exhibition have been organized and administered by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

I hope to make it out to see the exhibition this fall. Nova Scotia was already in our travel plans for this year, and hopefully we can tweak the timing of our trip to get to this show.