2014 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize shortlist
www.aimiaagophotographyprize.com
The Aimia | AGO Photography Prize is pleased to announce the four extraordinary artists that have been shortlisted for the 2014 Prize. The Prize, co-presented by Aimia, a global leader in loyalty management, and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), will award each of the four artists a six-week artist residency in Canada and feature their work in an AGO exhibition opening September 3, 2014. The winner of the 50,000 CAD prize will be chosen by public vote, which begins today at the Prize’s website and Facebook page.
The 2014 finalists are:
David Hartt (Canada)
Elad Lassry (Israel/USA)
Nandipha Mntambo (South Africa)
Lisa Oppenheim (USA)
Together representing the cutting edge of international photography, the four artists engage with broad historical and cultural forces such as war, colonialism, urban planning and advertising. They each have a distinct approach to visualizing the world, creating environments and materials that express diverse and thoughtful ideas about the ways past and present experiences are communicated through images.
David Hartt was born in Montreal in 1967 and currently lives and works in Chicago. In his installations, which include photographs, videos and sculptures, Hartt explores how physical spaces reflect the ideas and beliefs of a particular time and place. By investigating the materials, symbols and histories that shape our surroundings, he calls attention to the ways our built environments exist and evolve. After extensive research and site visits, Hartt distills this material into complex and elegant installations. His exhibition Stray Light, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011) travelled to the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2014), among other galleries. His work is in many public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Canada. He graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994.
Elad Lassry was born in Tel Aviv in 1977 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. At the centre of his work is the question, “What is a picture?” His practice suggests that the photograph is an elusive “unit.” Lassry uses multiple aesthetic modes and technologies to create analog images, digital interventions, moving pictures, design applications and applied arts that seem utilitarian but produce complex visual sensations. His ongoing investigation leads him to refer back to and experiment with a variety of visual sources—textbooks, manuals, film stills, marketing materials and science texts—which at turns contradict and play off one another in his work. Lassry uses this dynamic to pinpoint what he calls a “contemporary condition” in which the photograph is a flexible entity, seductively powerful and yet untrustworthy. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan. Lassry earned an MFA in 2007 from the University of Southern California.
Nandipha Mntambo was born in 1982 in Swaziland and currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mntambo’s practice includes sculpture, photography, performance and video. Her work investigates such dualities as male/female, attraction/repulsion, animal/ human, and European/African. Mntambo makes sculptures from cowhide, using her own body to mould the forms. In many of her videos and photographs, she appears wearing her sculptures, suggesting individuals’ capacity to shape the world around them, while also highlighting notions of race, gender and history. Mntambo won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011. In 2007 she graduated with an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
Lisa Oppenheim was born in 1975 in New York City, where she lives and works. Oppenheim’s photographs and videos are composed of images and materials from the recent and not-so-recent past that she re-processes and transforms through various historical and contemporary techniques. Her process often begins online, where she sources images and objects that she reinterprets photographically using both analogue and digital technologies. Through this approach, the process itself becomes source material, as Oppenheim gives photographic images new forms and new contexts. Recent solo exhibitions include Forever is Composed of Nows, Kunsterverin in Hamburg; From Abigail to Jacob (Works 2004–2014), Kunstverein in Graz; and Heaven Blazing into the Head, The Approach Gallery, London. Oppenheim graduated with an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College in 2002.
A jury of three selected the four finalists from a long list of 22 artists. The jury included lead juror Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s associate curator of photography; Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian-born, German-based scholar, curator, writer and director of Haus der Kunst, Munich; and New York–based photo and video-based artist Laurie Simmons.
The Aimia | AGO Photography Prize is Canada’s most significant award for contemporary photography, recognizing photographers from around the world whose work has exhibited extraordinary potential over the preceding five years. It has a total annual prize value of more than 100,000 CAD, with 50,000 CAD awarded to the winner, 5,000 CAD awarded to each of the other shortlisted artists and 25,000 CAD supporting a national scholarship program for students studying photography at select institutions across Canada. The remainder funds six-week residencies for the four shortlisted artists at institutions across Canada.
The winner of the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize is chosen entirely by public vote. Online voting opens today at aimiaagophotographyprize.com and on the Prize’s Facebook page and is open until 11:59pm on October 27, 2014. Visitors to the AGO can also cast a vote inside the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize 2014 exhibition, on view at the AGO from September 3, 2014 to January 4, 2015. The winner of the 2014 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize will be announced on October 29, 2014.
*Image: left to right: David Hartt, The Republic I, 2014. Pigment print, 149.9 x 224.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Nolan Gallery, New York. Elad Lassry, Woman, Espresso Grinder, 2011. Chromogenic print and aluminum frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Collection of Joan and David Genser. Lisa Oppenheim, Smoke (still), 2013. Two-channel looped video, dimensions variable. Courtesy of The Approach. Nandipha Mntambo, Praça de Touros III, 2008. Pigment print, 111 x 166 cm. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg. All images © the artists.
