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The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation announced on Thursday that the renowned Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer is the 2013 recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO. The award, which is presented annually to one artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada, includes a $50,000 cash prize and a solo exhibition at the AGO. Farmer’s exhibition will open in February 2014.
The Vancouver-based Farmer received broad notices for his labor-intensive installation at dOCUMENTA 13, last summer, and in the interim year he’s been exhibiting abroad — most recently at the Barbican, where the Guardian praised Farmer’s “compelling vision.”
Farmer’s installation works trace a line between collage, video, performance, drawing, sculpture, photography, and found objects; and they signal an important turning point in the history of photography. His dOCUMENTA installation, for instance, “Leaves of Grass” — a long and intricate collage installation of cut-out LIFE photographs that subsumed a logia and required the help of over 90 volunteers — at once relegates documentary photography to its place in the historical cannon, while elevating it to a unique activity in contemporary art. The narrative possibilities woven through “Leaves” produces ‘aura’ from the commercial. Further to this, as Farmer often changes his installations with each new exhibition, he creates in a sense, editions-of-one from reproducible media.
Farmer maintains ties to, and a distance from, the Vancouver School. While he studied under Ian Wallace, and closely follows the work of Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas, Farmer established a unique trajectory, while exhibiting elements of their influence. Examining his ambivalence towards this zeitgeist in an interview with ARTINFO Canada, last August, Farmer said:
Part of my work could be seen as finding my place in all of that. What artists like Wallace, Wall, and Douglas did for me was to open up a door to theatricality and to the construction of history. Understanding it as an arrangement and the possibility of recontextualizing it, or rearranging it to shake out new meanings. There was a lot of interest in revisionism when I was in school whether it was through feminism, or a queer lens, or race. The West Coast kind of promises the possibility of reinvention, to reexamine certain traditions and mix them up. I feel very lucky to have come out of that community, to have experienced those forces, the commitment established by those artists.
With a long history working through and for the Banff Center during director Kitty Scott’s tenure there, Farmer reflected on their relationship at the time of her departure for the AGO, where she now holds the title of curator of modern and contemporary art: “Kitty was my ‘agent’,” he said. “We have worked closely together for many years, and it is an honor to have an experience like this with someone. She is able to give me insight into my work that I am just not capable of having myself. She is loyal to artists in the sense that she is dedicated to their ideas, a guardian and steward of their work, the caretaker, which I believe is the origins of the word ‘curator’.”
Of Farmer’s prize, today, Scott released a statement reading, “Geoffrey Farmer’s works are unique because they are constructed anew each time they’re assembled. In this sense, the display at the AGO will offer visitors a chance to see the most recent workings of Geoffrey’s mind. We’re delighted,” she said.
Born in British Columbia in 1967, Farmer lives and works in Vancouver. A graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, he first exhibited at the AGO in 2000. The gallery purchased a significant work by Farmer in 2012 entitled “And Finally the Street Becomes the Main Character (Clock).”
“I’m deeply touched to receive this prize,” said Farmer. “Gershon Iskowitz has set an example through his generosity of spirit — a legacy that asks artists to support and help each other. I’m truly honored.”
A version of this article also appears on ARTINFO Canada.
— Sky Goodden
(Geoffrey Farmer begins work on “Leaves of Grass,” 2012, holding a LIFE magazine. Photo credit: Aubrey Mayer.)