Winnipeg-based artist finalist for prestigious Sobey award

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Winnipeg-based artist Rhayne Vermette is a finalist for the 2024 Sobey Art Award, a prestigious prize for contemporary visual artists in Canada.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/06/2024 (837 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg-based artist Rhayne Vermette is a finalist for the 2024 Sobey Art Award, a prestigious prize for contemporary visual artists in Canada.

“I’m ecstatic,” says the Métis image maker and storyteller, whose 2021 debut feature film Ste. Anne won the Toronto International Film Festival’s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film.

Vermette, who represents the Prairies, is among the six shortlisted artists from a longlist of 30, representing six regions of Canada. She’s joined by Taqralik Partridge (Circumpolar), Judy Chartrand (Pacific), June Clark (Ontario), Nico Williams (Quebec) and Mathieu Léger (Atlantic).

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                                Rhayne Vermette will have her work displayed at the National Gallery of Canada.

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Rhayne Vermette will have her work displayed at the National Gallery of Canada.

The award, which was juried by six Canadian artists who were either former Sobey recipients or finalists, comes with a $465,000 purse. The overall winner will receive $100,000, while the other shortlisted artists will receive $25,000. The remaining longlisters also receive $10,000.

For Vermette, the nomination offers a major opportunity to explore other parts of her artistic practice. In addition to the prize money, finalists will have their work exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada from Oct. 4, 2024 to March 16, 2025.

“I think I’ve sort of been just seen as a filmmaker, and most of my work has been presented in cinemas, but my films are inspired by my work through collage, my work with poetry and my work with photography. So I’m really excited to get to do an installation at the National Gallery and exercise all these sort of obscure facets of stuff that I do,” she says.

It will be a busy summer for Vermette. In addition to working on her NGC installation, she’s currently wrapping up shooting her second feature, Levers — “the premise is the sun doesn’t rise for a day. I really wanted to express something different in my cinematic language, so it’s kind of like rural, weird science fiction,” she says with a laugh — which will be released in 2025.

The winner of the 2024 Sobey Art Award will be announced Nov. 9.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Jen Zoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.

 

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