Ontario - Bridget Moser
The Sobey Art Award is Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art. The annual prize is given to an artist under age 40, who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated.
- MORE: The 2017 Sobey Art Award
Bridget Moser has presented work in venues across Canada, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, The National Arts Centre, and Western Front,Vancouver. She has presented projects throughout the US and Europe, and has been a resident artist at The Banff Centre and at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Visual Arts News, Artribune Italy, and a collaborative artist book published by Mousse Magazine. She was selected by Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator and
Associate Director at the Vancouver Art Gallery, as a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize and is a 2016 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Finalist Prize recipient. Her work can be found in private and museum collections in Canada and Italy.
2017 Sobey Art Prize Juror Sarah Robayo Sheridan on Bridget Moser
This year's Ontario finalists – Nadia Belerique, Erika Defreitas, Sameer Farooq, Jean-Paul Kelly and Bridget Moser – are artists who all address critical urgencies in their art. Likewise, the cross-Canada shortlist represents a glimpse of timely concerns, which I look forward to highlighting in the exhibition. Amid this rich community of artists, Bridget Moser has been singled out for defining her own iconoclastic genre. Hitting all the bewildering emotional registers of internet culture, her signature style is suspended between prop comedy, theatre of the absurd and intuitive dance. With a keen ear for pop tunes, a sharpened online shopping sensibility and an uncanny ability to meld criticality and humour, she emerges out of a specific Toronto scene where the comedy/performance hybrid is enjoying unbridled play. Moser's singular voice joins a sentinel species of millennial artists alerting audiences to the new paradoxes of commodity culture gone wild, and offers tragicomic remedy in excess of even the most bombastic late night infomercial.