The awards have been announced and without further ado, here are the winners of the 3 $1000 cash visual arts awards, and the $500 cash time arts award.
Daniel Rosen – $1000 cash award
Not Faint Canaries but Abrosial – Colored pencil on printmaking paper, mounted on birch panel
I am fascinated by how we learn about and conceptualize our history. I am enamored with the anachronistic and the ambiguous, and in love with the aesthetic of the “old timey.” I am enchanted by the process by which the actual, factual narratives of human life of times long past transmute into mythology and intermingle in our heads.
In more recent bodies of work, rather than just re-present the past, I re-engage it, and adopt and adapt elements from throughout history to construct images which confuse space, place, and time. All of these components combine into highly obsessive, intricate, and insanely ornamented compositions which blur the lines between fact and fiction, old and new, allowing viewers to piece together stories and narratives of their own. Portraiture is the primary vehicle as no matter the mode of communication, human beings are the story tellers, prophets, and raconteurs. We are the time machines.
Jeff Kolak – $1000 cash award
Flood
To have an image look into you, as much as you look into it, is my goal as I create an image. I want you to lock eyes with the character in the piece and feel what it is he or she may be feeling and create a story, a world even, in your mind. There is a goal to keep a person looking. Good characters in a piece draw a viewer in, as does an incredible amount of detail and design.
Peter Staples – $1000 cash award
The Other Things – Woodcut print
I work primarily in frenzied ballpoint pen drawings and wood relief prints. I use my artwork as an emotional and existential purge. My favorite subject is the male body. Themes I dwell on in my work include struggle, terror, depression, survival, The Hero’s Journey, control, helplessness, reality, simulacra and simulation, illusion, distortion, deformity, mind-body interactions, crystal structure, the collective unconscious, and self-actualization.
Pardis Parker – $500 cash award
Afghan – film
Pardis Parker is an award-winning director, writer, actor, and comedian.
A six-time Canadian Comedy Award nominee and a finalist for Canada’s Next Top Comic and Bite TV’s Stand Up and Bite Me, he recently won British star David Baddiel’s international stand-up competition and previously became the first Canadian ever to book the CBS Diversity Showcase.
His films and music videos, including The Dance, Afghan, and Two Men, Two Cows, Two Guns, have screened at over 150 film festivals worldwide and received over 80 awards and nominations. He has received multiple Best Actor nominations for his work in The Dance and Afghan, and has appeared in television and film on both sides of the border, including Combat Hospital on ABC, Little Mosque on the Prairie on CBC, Single White Spenny and Moderation Town on Showcase, Really Me on The Family Channel, and indie drama Snow.
He currently resides in Los Angeles, where he’s a regular performer at the Hollywood Improv, Hollywood Laugh Factory, and World Famous Comedy Store.
A regular blogger, you can read words that he types at www.pardisparker.com.
