Kenojuak Ashevak, Serge Giguere, Michel Goulet, Alex Janvier, Tanya Mars and Eric Metcalfe have won the 2008 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Chantal Gilbert has won the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in the fine crafts, while Shirley Thomson has received the outstanding contribution award for her work as a cultural administrator, gallery director and arts advocate.

In addition to a $25,000 prize, the winners will be presented with
original artworks created by furniture maker and designer Peter Fleming, winner of the 2000 Saidye Bronfman Award.

Kenojuak Ashevak is probably the best known and most acclaimed of all the remarkable Inuit artists who
have emerged in the North in the last half century.

More info HERE

Kenojuak Ashevak. Image: wikimedia.org

Considered one of Canada’s most innovative multidisciplinary artists, Tanya Mars has been active in the Canadian alternative art scene since the early 1970s.

Since the early 1980s, Michel Goulet has been part of the movement for the renewal of sculpture, both in
terms of formal vocabulary and at the level of content and meaning.

Alex Janvier. Image: dreamersanddoers.ca

Alex Janvier has been painting for over 40 years and has created a unique style, his own “visual language,” informed by the rich cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage of the Dene in northern Alberta.

Eric Metcalfe epitomizes the avant-garde in Canadian art. Since the late 1960s, his art practice has crossed, and merged, disciplines: painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, printmaking, performance, video and film.

Serge Giguere. Image: lanouvelle.net

Serge Giguere is one of Quebec’s leading documentary filmmakers.

More info HERE.

Nationally renowned jeweller Chantal Gilbert penetrated the global market as an artistic knifemaker. This new direction has allowed her to take a different approach to silversmithing while continuing her aesthetic research on the symbols and rituals that shape the human psyche.

For more info, please click HERE.