The artist Faye HeavyShield (Kainai) has been awarded the annual Gershon Iskowitz Prize, granting her C$75,000 ($58,500) and a solo exhibition due to open next year at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
HeavyShield creates Minimalist sculptures and installations that evoke elements of her ancestral nation, the Kainai (also called Blood) Nation of the foothills of southern Alberta, where she was born and continues to live and work. Catholic symbolism also appears in her work, referencing her own religious upbringing and the historic Christianisation of First Nations people.
The artist, born in 1953, earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Calgary and previously studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design. In the 1980s she began making large-scale installations, some that were site-specific and used organic materials. Her works often feature recurring geometric patterns like grids or lines, or visually meditative undulating spirals, such as the work Wave (2018) featured in her solo exhibition Calling Stones (Conversations) at the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2018.
Faye HeavyShield, Wave (2018) Photo by Blaine Campbell
HeavyShield’s work is included in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada and has been featured in exhibitions at institutions including the Remai Modern in Saskatoon.
In a previous interview, HeavyShield describes her practice as “a reflection of my environment and personal history as lived in the physical geography of southern Alberta with its prairie grass, river coulees and wind, and an upbringing in the Kainai community with a childhood stint in the Catholic residential system”.
She adds that the “past, present and imagined make up the vocabulary used to realise my thoughts and ideas; responses and references to the land, body and language”.
The award, named for the Polish-born painter who established it in 1986, is Canada’s second largest art prize after the C$100,000 Sobey Art Award, administered by the National Gallery of Canada, which was most recently awarded to the Kalaaleq Greenlandic Inuk performance artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory.
Jurors for this edition of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize included the artist and former prize winner Valérie Blass, Catherine Crowston, the director of the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, and other curators and Canadian museum trustees.