Three British Columbia artists have received the VIVA Visual Art Award -- Lucie Chan, Cindy Mochizuki and Tania Willard.
The $15,000 awards, from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, are chosen by a selection committee from the art community.
Meanwhile, the $5,000 Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing goes to Vancouver's Dorothy Woodend, the culture editor for the online news magazine The Tyee.
Woodend, who has written occasionally for Galleries West, was nominated this year for a National Magazine Award for Best Column.
Emerging writer Paloma Pacheco, a Vancouver-based freelancer, was selected for a residency at the Banff Centre.
Chan, born in Guyana, is an associate professor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and was on the long list for the Sobey Art Award in 2006 and 2010.
Her focus is on cross-cultural narratives and connections between seemingly disparate lives, and her socially engaged practice often involves eliciting and responding to the life stories of strangers
Mochizuki, based in Vancouver, has exhibited, performed and screened her work nationally and internationally. In 2015, she received the Mayor’s Arts Award in new media and film.
Her art often employs elements of experimental storytelling, drawing on both memories and archival records. She is interested in personal histories, especially of family members, as well as other immigrant and diasporic experiences that make connections between Canada and Japan.
Tania Willard, an assistant professor in creative studies at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator of Secwépemc and settler heritage. Her creative practice often alludes to shifting ideas around the contemporary and the traditional, as well as to forms and spaces in which Indigenous culture intersects with other cultures.
This year's VIVA award jury members were Vancouver-based artists Julian Hou, Allison Hrabluik, Hannah Jickling, Ben Reeves and Charlene Vickers.
The Max Wyman Award jury was Brenda Leadlay, executive director of the B.C. Alliance for Arts and Culture; Scott Watson, director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and writer Max Wyman.
Source: Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation