UBC grad Simranpreet Anand wins The Polygon Gallery's Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize
Lens-based images that play on dhurries, spice, textiles, and pixellation earn $10,000 prize and a project with the gallery
Simranpreet Anand’s insatiable desires of a bourgeoisie.
AN ARTIST’S INNOVATIVE and socially charged images of textiles and spices have just won her this year’s Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize.
The Polygon Gallery has announced UBC fine-arts grad Simranpreet Anand as the winner of the $10,000 prize, which also carries the opportunity to produce a project with the Gallery.
Anand’s series titled insatiable desires of a bourgeoisie depicts three woven dhurrie rugs as abstract squares, creating pixelated images of spice mixes. Dhurries and spice mixes were treasured commodities of a British middle class during colonial rule. Elsewhere, in Anand’s 16-minute short film mukti maal kanik laal heera man ranjan kee maaiaa comments on the wastefulness of the textile industry, depicting hands delicately laying out an accumulating pile of sacred fabrics and pulling loose its threads.
The jury for this year’s competition, on view at The Polygon until January 29, was struck by the way Anand uses the language of everyday materials to evoke fraught socio-political histories. It wrote: “Simranpreet's work reminds us of the expansive possibilities of lens-based work as well as its descriptive potential. In starting with everyday materials such as spices and textiles as subjects, she demonstrates the ways in which everyday objects carry cultural weight as well as the histories global capitalism. Her ability to translate these urgent narratives into visually sumptuous, materially inventive works adds to their power.”
“My works build upon my prior explorations of photography as a play on how cultural knowledge can be inscribed in an abstract object — like the photographic exposure of tied turbans, or the continual alternation between stillness and culturally embodied movement,” Anand said in an artist’s stataement. “This serves to unpack some of the research that goes into my artistic projects, particularly how photographic process and material process can augment and subvert one another to generate new meanings.”
UBC Okanagan graduate Aaron Leon and SFU MFA graduate Katayoon Yousefbigloo are runners-up, and will receive $4,000 each. The other four finalists—Wei Chen, Sidney Gordon, Natasha Katedralis, and Jake Kimble—will receive $2,500.
The jury members were Emmy Lee Wall, executive director of the Capture Photography Festival; Richard Hill, the Smith Jarislowsky senior curator of Canadian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery; and Samuel Roy-Bois, artist and associate professor in creative studies at UBC Okanagan.
The Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize is awarded annually to an emerging BC-based artist working across the mediums of film, photography, or video. Artists are nominated by staff and faculty from established arts institutions, organizations, and post-secondary programs from across the province. You can read more about the exhibition in our article here.
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