The three winning artists are all women from Vancouver.
Three Vancouver artists are among the winners of this year’s Canadian Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
The Canada Council for the Arts made the announcement on Tuesday, saying eight artists from across Canada are being honoured in recognition of their contributions to visual arts, media arts and fine crafts.
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Each of the winners, chosen by peer assessment committees, will receive a $25,000 prize and a bronze medallion. In addition, artistic video portraits of the winners have been created by professional filmmakers from Canada.
Here are the winners from B.C.:
Artistic Achievement Awards
Germaine Koh
Germaine Koh is an artist from Vancouver whose work ranges widely across media. Her work adapts familiar objects, actions, and spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems, according to the Canada Council for the Arts.
Her ongoing projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice. In recent years, she has served as Vancouver’s first engineering artist in residence and as the Koerner artist in residence at the University of British Columbia, and for the 2023-24 academic year she will be a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University.
Shannon Walsh
Vancouver filmmaker Shannon Walsh has written and directed five feature documentaries on topics ranging from labour rights to grief and climate change.
Her work is known for emphasizing marginalized voices and stories on the front lines of vital contemporary issues. As a scholar, she has published works on inequality, social justice, and visual methods, according to the Canada Council for the Arts. She teaches film as an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and is a research associate at the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg.
Nettie Wild
Vancouver filmmaker Nettie Wild works collaboratively with her crews to create feature documentaries such as A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution, A Place Called Chiapas, and FIX: The Story of an Addicted City.
She is currently co-directing Go Fish with Scott Smith to be released in 2023. Wild and her team have won the Prix du Public at the NFB’s 50th Anniversary Salute to the Documentary, and top honours at the American Film Festival, the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, and the Berlin International Film Festival, according to the the Canada Council for the Arts.
Wild is a recipient of the Birks/TIFF Women in Film Award and has received an honorary doctorate from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
ticrawford@postmedia.com