7 artists earn $15K mid-career awards

Last Updated: Thursday, November 5, 2009 | 5:15 PM ET

CBC News

The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) is a 2009 tableau vivant created by visual artist Adad Hannah of Montreal, one of the winners of a $15,000 mid-career award. (Pierre-Franois Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal)

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced the seven winners of $15,000 awards for mid-career artists in publishing, performing and visual arts.

The awards have been given annually since 1971, supported by a bequest from the late Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton.

The winners are:

• Dance: Tammy Forsythe is a Montreal choreographer and founder of Tusketdance. Her works include The Backtrack, a winner at the Festival international de nouvelle danse, and the 2006 installation work The Deergirl Diaries: gestures of combat and passion.
• Integrated arts: 2boys.tv is a multimedia performance and cabaret duo founded by Montreal's Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard. Lawson was co-founder of Winnipeg performance troupe PRIMUS and Pollard is a multimedia artist who is technical director for OBORO New Media Lab and Exhibition Centre in Montreal.
• Media Arts: Jackson 2bears, a Mohawk multimedia artist and theorist based in Victoria, has created installation works that have been shown acress Canada and internationally. He also wrote the scores for the short feature Bloodriver by Kent Monkman and Urbannation.
• Music: Kirk MacDonald, a Toronto saxophonist and composer who has performed on over 40 CDs as both leader and sideman, leads the19-piece Kirk MacDonald Jazz Orchestra. He recently released Family Suite, an 11-part suite for jazz quartet, and Songbook Vol. 1, a collection of his compositions for jazz quartet.
• Theatre: Drew Hayden Taylor, an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations in Ontario, wrote and directed Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, a documentary filmn on aboriginal humour. He has been artist director of Native Earth Performing Arts and is author of Funny, You Don't Look Like One and The Night Wanderer.
• Visual Arts: Adad Hannah is an artist who combines video, photography and performance in "tableaux vivants." The Montreal-based artist has produced work in collaboration with such institutions as the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Rodin Gallery in Seoul.
• Writing and publishing: André Girard is a Québécois novelist who received the Canada-Japan Literary Award for Marcher le silence — carnets du Japon, a Japanese-style travel diary. His fifth novel, Port-Alfred Plaza, published in 2007, begins in a series in which two young Quebeckers meet once a year in a major capital city.

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