Winnipeg-born Divya Mehra is C$100,000 ($75,000) richer after being named winner final evening (16 November) of the 2022 Sobey Artwork Award, described by organiser the Nationwide Gallery of Canada as considered one of “essentially the most beneficiant prizes for modern artists on the earth”, with a complete of C$400,000 ($300,000) up for grabs.
“That is so surreal proper now, that is so bananas,” mentioned Mehra, whose mother and father emigrated from India, when accepting the award on the award ceremony in Ottawa. “I’ve been working because it seems like eternally.”
She added, “I wished to do comics since I used to be a teen, I wished to be a comic-book artist. I learn each Archie Double Digest.” Marvel comics have been one other favorite. Fittingly, she mentioned, she “makes use of humor as some extent of entry” to her work.
Mehra represents the Prairies and North area of Canada, which additionally garnered high honors in 2021, when Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, who had squared off with a polar bear and included its pores and skin into her successful work, took the award. Runners-up this time have been Tyshan Wright (representing the Atlantic area), Stanley Février (from Québec), Azza El Siddique (from Ontario) and Krystle Silverfox (representing the West Coast and Yukon area), every of whom will pocket C$25,000 ($18,800). The 20 longlisted artists will every obtain C$10,000 ($7,500).
Angela Cassie, interim director and chief government of the Nationwide Gallery of Canada, tipped her cap to Mehra and all of the artists who took half. “We thank all the unimaginable artists who created dynamic experiences and allowed for brand spanking new methods of seeing ourselves and our numerous tales,” she mentioned. The 5 finalists are featured in an ongoing exhibition on the gallery (till 12 March 2023).
Mehra is a College of Manitoba and Columbia College grad who was additionally a Sobey finalist in 2017, when the age restrict was nonetheless set at 40 and below. Amongst her works then was a crushed golden Jaguar automotive. She incorporates discovered artefacts and ready-made objects as symbols of resistance in a mess of varieties. Her first solo present within the US, at Los Angeles’s Night time Gallery in 2021, consisted of two large inflatable sculptures primarily based on the emoji for an urn and a wave—a “tsunami of grief”, as she instructed The New York Occasions.
“The jury discovered Divya Mehra’s work resoundingly well timed and complicated in addressing techniques of cultural illustration, manufacturing and authority,” jury chair Jonathan Shaughnessy mentioned in a press release. “Untethered to any particular medium, the impression of Mehra’s follow extends past established constructs of artwork. Her method is outlined by its sharp wit, disarmingly playful attract, and attentiveness to language and aesthetics. Her most up-to-date explorations flip in direction of problems with repatriation, possession and modes of cultural consumption that basically implicate each establishments and their publics.”
Mehra’s work has appeared on the quilt of the now-defunct journal Canadian Artwork and she or he was additionally featured on the CBC artwork documentary sequence Within the Making, the place she travelled to India to start work on a brand new inflatable work, a bouncy reproduction Taj Mahal palace, which was then acquired by the Nationwide Gallery.
Her latest efforts concerned a stone carving that was looted from India and had been on present on the MacKenzie Artwork Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan for years, incorrectly recognized as Vishnu. “I realised it was a feminine determine, the goddess Annapurna,” she mentioned of the piece, which was subsequently returned to India. As a replacement, she added, “I proposed an Indiana Jones-inspired bag of sand”.
