Filipina-Canadian filmmaker Stephanie Comilang has won the 2019 Sobey Art Award.Leroy Schulz
Experimental filmmaker Stephanie Comilang, a 39-year-old Filipina-Canadian who lives in Toronto and Berlin, is the winner of the 2019 Sobey Art Award, the National Gallery of Canada and the Sobey Art Foundation announced Friday.
Comilang, who was presented with the $100,000 prize in a ceremony at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, makes quasi-documentary films that tell stories about labour and migration. For example, Come To Me, Paradise is a 2016 science-fiction film narrated by a Tagalog-speaking drone. It examines how Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong congregate in Central, the city’s financial district, during their time off to talk, eat, dance and do manicures. The film, which reflects on the social experience of a diaspora, the alienating and unifying effects of technology, and the use of civic space, is shown as a 25-minute, three-channel video installation.
The jury, led by National Gallery contemporary curator Joseé Drouin-Brisebois and drawn from across the country, said it was "impressed by her ambitious practice which engages in a complex manner with what has been lost through colonization.” Comilang graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design University and shows widely at both international film festivals and art exhibitions.
“Representation is everything,” the artist said in a statement provided by the organizers. “Can we see ourselves in the wider world? Winning the Sobey Art Award and representing a demographic that looks like me hopefully lets others know the limitless possibilities of who you can be as an artist.”
Created in 2002, the Sobey Art Award is a $650,000 annual program that aims to boost new developments in contemporary Canadian art by giving artists national and international attention early in their careers. As well as the top prize, the four finalists artists receive $25,000 each, while the other long-listed artists receive $1,000 each. Both the long list and short list are assembled by region, with one finalist from each. The program also offers several residencies for the long-listed artists and the finalists.
Comilang represents Ontario. The Quebec finalist was Nicolas Grenier, who works in Montreal and Los Angeles, creating architectural and sculptural installations that critique economic, political and social systems. The Prairies and the North were represented by Calgary artist Kablusiak, an Inuvialuk from the Western Arctic who goes by only one name. Kablusiak uses humour in work about cultural displacement, for example, making soapstone carvings of consumer items, such as cigarettes or razors.
From the West Coast and the Yukon, the short list also included Vancouver artist Anne Low who creates sculptural installations using textiles and printmaking to examine how everyday objects such as chairs or curtains can be removed from their historical context to function as art. Halifax artist D’Arcy Wilson was selected from Atlantic Canada; an assistant professor at Memorial University in Corner Brook, her work addresses the colonial relationship with the natural world through installations and performances.
For the first time in the award’s history, the exhibition of the finalists’ work is taking place outside the National Gallery: 35 works are on display at the Art Gallery of Alberta until Jan. 5.
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Kate Taylor