Quebec - Jacynthe Carrier

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

Through photography and video, Jacynthe Carrier explores the different relationships the body has with the environment and ways of conceptualizing and appropriating the land. She produces different types of interventions in the landscape, where bodies and objects are assembled and staged in performative situations. She holds an MA in Visual Arts from Concordia University, and she has taken part in several solo and group exhibitions (Fresnoy, La Manif d'art 2017, Centre CLARK, Galerie de l'UQAM, Gallery 44). Her work has also been presented at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, as well as in exhibitions in France, Canada, Mexico and the United States. She was selected in 2013 for Quebec's preliminary list for the Sobey Prize, and was a recipient of the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2012 and the Prix Videre Création in 2015. She lives and works in Québec City and is represented by Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montréal.

Sobey Art Award Juror Claude Bélanger on Jacynthe Carrier 

"I have always paid close attention to the work of Jacynthe Carrier, to her career and her influences. Her videos and photos tell us about promiscuity and invented rituals, evoking her reflections on the relationships between humans and their environment, between body and territory. Often composed of multiple performers, her images flirt with the performing arts and question the different ways that we inhabit the environment. She carefully chooses her intervention sites, often scarred or abandoned places where she creates her living tableaux. These compositions, which bring together both personal and popular mythologies, as well as daily and shared gestures, explore questions around tradition, cycles and never-ending searches."

The Art of Jacynthe Carrier