GRAND PRIZE
Sobey Art Award nominees showcase Canada’s diversity and differences,
The Sobey Art Award, to be awarded Wednesday night in Toronto, is Canada’s pre-eminent contemporary art prize.
It’s a distinction that would have been easy enough to claim 15 years ago, when it declared Brian Jungen its inaugural winner in 2002. Back then, art prizes in this country were a slim field indeed — one of the reasons Donald Sobey, one of the patriarchs of the East Coast grocery mogul family, decided to found it — and the Sobey, modelled after Britain’s Turner Prize, was looking to shake things up.
Since then, an ever increasing slate of awards, from annual photo prizes sponsored by AIMIA and Scotiabank to a yearly painting award from RBC, have crowded the field. But none enjoy the profile, and the significance, the Sobey still claims.
At a splashy media launch Monday morning, the five finalists took turns in front of various cameras as an exhibition of their work at the University of Toronto’s Art Museum was unveiled for the first time.
Whatever else it can claim, year to year the Sobey remains a bellwether of broader shifts in Canadian culture and this year’s puts a very fine point on its pulse-taking sensibility: in this moment of cataclysmic division of all kind, from race to class to gender, four of its finalists are women, two are Indigenous and almost all make social rifts between different ways of being in this country the raw material of their work.
The Sobey is important for plenty of reasons, but the meat of it is its resounding currency. Not beholden to a single medium, it sidesteps formalist edicts and steps right into the realm of raw ideas. Its staunch commitment to a breadth of field that sees a public short list of dozens of artists from coast to coast makes its very being as comprehensive an annual survey of art activity in Canada as you’ll find.
Being taken in-house by the Na- tional Gallery of Canada in 2015 puts the weight of the country’s top art museum behind it. And its purse, at $110,000 — $50,000 for the winner, $10,000 for each of the runners-up and $1,000 for all nominees — doesn’t hurt, either.
Nor does its sense of occasion: as it flits from city to city from year to year, the roving Sobey exhibition and its accompanying gala gives the Canadian art world a shot in the arm, coupling gravitas with a salubrious air that none comes close to matching.
Being on top brings with it circumspection. There are those who ques- tion its model, restricting nominees to artists under 40, a distinction the Turner in the U.K. dropped this year (its threshold was 50). And for the full span of its life, plenty have groused at its five-region structure, which gives equal weight to the sparsely populated regions of the Prairies and Atlantic provinces and the more art-industry-dense centres of Ontario and Quebec.
Still, somehow, it works: Sobey winners are often hard to argue with, and the short lists rarely anything less than a spot-on representation of art practice in this country in the immediate here and now. This year, Toronto can see for itself as it hosts the gala Wednesday and the exhibition until Dec. 9. These photos are what you’ll see at the Art Museum, after the confetti gets swept up.