THE 2020 WINNERS
Toronto-born Curtiss Randolph constructs scenes as either tableau or staged documentary narratives. Having grown up in a theatre family, the elements of stage production crept into his working process at an early stage. Mixing realism, surrealism, and gonzo journalism, Randolph challenges viewers’ preconceived notion of documentary-style as a way to question ideas of fact and fiction in the photographic medium.

Katherine Takpannie is an Ottawa-based Inuk artist, writer and graduate of the Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS) program. Her photographs set performative and political gestures against both natural and built environments, including intimate portraits of women. Her work is held in the City of Ottawa’s art collection and has appeared in Getting Under Our Skin exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph and They Forgot We Were Seeds exhibition at the Carleton
University Art Gallery.

Vancouver/Berlin-based Noah Friebel focuses on the fabricated aspect of the photograph, using elements of sculpture and installation to examine our relationship to images, each other, and the narrowing space in between. Since graduating from Emily Carr University with a BFA in 2018, Friebel has been part of several group shows: notably Green Glass Door at Trapp Projects and The Lind Prize 2018 at Polygon Gallery.

THE 2021 WINNERS
Chris Donovan is a lens-based artist working in Toronto and New Brunswick. Hailing from the industrial city of Saint John, his practice focuses on the intersection of community and industry. His work has been awarded by Pictures of the Year International (U of Missouri), The Alexia Foundation (Syracuse University), The New Brunswick Arts Board, The Toronto Arts Council, and exhibited across Canada at photography festivals including CONTACT (Toronto), Capture (Vancouver), Exposure (Calgary), Flash (Winnipeg), and Zoom (Saguenay). He is a member of the Boreal Collective and currently pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University as a Graduate Fellow.

Toronto-based artist Dainesha Nugent-Palache has participated in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. A founding member of the plumb, an ad hoc collective of artists, writers and curators and art venue in Toronto, she has also curated for the feminist music festival and concert series Venus Fest, and Blindspots, an art exhibition and film screening where queer artists explore LGBTQ experience through a diasporic lens. Graduate and recipient of major awards, her artwork is found in The Wedge Collection, Toronto Dominion Bank Art Collection and private collections. Her experiences as an artist have also been spotlighted in CBC COVID residencies series.

Vancouver-based artist Dustin Brons MFA (UC San Diego), BFA (UBC), and recent participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program works with the recontextualization of existing materials across photographs, videos, and text. His work incorporates visual forms from Western art history as tools to process contemporary sources. Still life and landscape painting, gestural abstraction, linguistic conceptualism, and photographic devices from pictorialism to appropriation are re-configured in representations of climate change and gentrification, emphasizing the ways that visual forms contribute to shaping social and political understandings of these intangible yet totalizing processes.

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