Among the 25 visual artists in Canada longlisted for the 2021 Sobey Art Award are six graduates of OCAD University.
Jawa El Khash, Esmaa Mohamoud, Rajni Perera and collective Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko have been recognized by the prestigious art prize for emerging artists.
The award spotlights contemporary visual artists of all ages from all of Canada’s five regions: Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies and North, and West Coast and Yukon.
This year, a total of $400,000 in prize money will be awarded: $100,000 to the overall winner, $25,000 to each of the four other shortlisted artists, and $10,000 to each of the remaining 20 longlisted artists. In addition, the five shortlisted artists will be featured in an exhibition later this year at the National Gallery of Canada.
“To all of these talented and accomplished artists, congratulations on behalf of OCAD University. This significant recognition of your creative endeavours reflects the immense possibilities of contemporary art, and more broadly, the role of the arts in advancing our society, which has never been more important as we try to recover from the pandemic,” says Ana Serrano, President and Vice-Chancellor.
Jawal El Khash (pictured above, far left) earned her BFA in Integrated Media: Digital Painting & Expanded Animation from OCAD U in 2019. An artist, technologist and researcher, she uses virtual reality (VR), holography and other artmaking forms to offer a new way to experience the world around us. El Khash’s work has been displayed in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto and Istanbul, as well as online. Her 2020 VR work Hammam evokes the spiritual elements of light and water by immersing the viewer in a virtual bathhouse styled like the ones she remembers from her upbringing in Damascus, Syria. She also leads community workshops on game development, VR and augmented reality. El Khash is currently working on a Toronto Arts Council-funded VR project involving the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
Esmaa Mohamoud (pictured above, far right) is a Toronto-based African Canadian artist who graduated from OCAD University in 2016 with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design. The multidisciplinary artist investigates Black body politics, depicting aesthetically the paradoxes of Blackness, its hypervisibility and invisibility, concerning herself with the ways in which racialized bodies navigate spaces as figures where complex gender and racial dynamics are confronted, performed and reimagined. Mohamoud has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Royal Ontario Museum and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Recent exhibitions have included To the Hoop: Basketball and Contemporary Art at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and Human Capital at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Her major solo exhibition, To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, organized by Museum London, is touring to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery through 2023.
Rajni Perera (pictured above, second from the right) completed her BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD U in 2011. Her paintings and sculptures explore the themes of hybridity, futurity, ancestorship, immigration, monsters and dream worlds. Created from a variety of mediums, her works have been displayed in galleries across Canada and in the U.S., Scotland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, UAE and Sri Lanka, where she grew up. She is a recipient of several grants, including from the Canada Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. A recent project is Traveller, a mixed-media series that portrays immigrants as humanity’s future victors, in a place where “the formerly displaced are presently powerful, safe, protected and flourishing.”
Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko (pictured above, second to the left) all graduated from OCAD U’s Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design in 2014. Artistic collaborators since 2013 who also have solo practices, they work primarily in experimental film and video, focusing on “the tensions of multiple subjectivities as a way to address the power inherent in narrative structures.” Their creative projects have been featured in dozens of exhibitions and film festivals worldwide. This fall, the trio will be among the participating artists in “Greater Toronto Art 2021,” a major survey of modern art to be staged by the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto.
Established in 2001 and jointly administered by the Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada, the Sobey Art Award aims to promote new developments in contemporary Canadian art, and provide opportunities for artists by bringing them global attention