Ottawa Creatives Celebrated at the 2023 Arts Awards - See the List of Recipients

The Ottawa Arts Council announced the final recipients of the annual Arts Awards last night at an in-person event in the Ottawa Little Theatre.

Each year, the Ottawa Arts Council places a call out to the greater arts community to secure nominations for the seven awards distributed annually: the Victor Tolgesy Award, which recognizes the accomplishments of residents who have contributed substantially to enriching cultural life in our city; the Peter Honeywell Mid-Career Artist Award, recognizing and encouraging the achievements of Ottawa artists of all disciplines who have evolved beyond the emerging stage in their career to become recognized professional working artists contributing to the community; the Emerging IBPOC Artist Award, which recognizes the achievements of artists of all disciplines from Ottawa's IBPoC (Indigenous, Black, and Persons of Colour) community who are in the early stages of their career in the arts and are working towards becoming recognized professional artists; the Project X Photography Award designed to recognize the merits of a publicly presented photographic project by an Ottawa-based artist; and, the Community Arts Educator Award, which recognizes excellence in community arts education and the accomplishments of artists who provide unique and creative learning experiences that inspire future generations and community art projects.

Project-based awards include the Corel Endowment for the Arts Award, a future-oriented award that encourages evolution, innovation, creativity, and excellence of artists working on new initiatives in all art disciplines in Ottawa; and the Young Artist Award which is a mentorship-driven award established to support young Ottawa artists 14 - 17 years old.

Nominations were evaluated by a peer assessment group composed of arts leaders in the community representing different artistic disciplines.

The 2023 Arts Awards Recipients (bios below):

Victor Tolgesy Award

Winner: Tam-Ca Vo-Van (discipline: multidisciplinary)

Peter Honeywell Mid-Career Artist Award

Winner: Marisa Gallemit (discipline: visual/multidisciplinary)
Finalist: Christos Pantieras (discipline: visual/multidisciplinary)
Finalist: Mishka Lavigne (discipline: literary/theatre)

Emerging IBPOC Artist Award

Winner: Velvet Wells (discipline: theatre)
Finalist: Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman (discipline: visual arts)
Finalist: Silvie Cheng (discipline: music)

Project X, Photography Award

Winner: Karina Kraenzle (discipline: photography)
Finalist: AM Dumouchel (discipline: photography)
Finalist: Joy Kardish (discipline: photography)
Community Arts Educator Award
Winner: Jesse Stewart (discipline: music)

Corel Endowment for the Arts Award

Winner: Speaking Vibrations (discipline: performance/multidisciplinary)
Young Artist Award
Winner: Asha Higginson (discipline: visual arts)

"Since 1988 the Ottawa Arts Council has awarded more than $400,000 to exceptional artists and to those who have shown outstanding commitment to the arts in the Ottawa community," said Nicole Milne, Executive Director of the Ottawa Arts Council. "This year, along with the generous support of award sponsors and partners we are collectively celebrating the resurgence of our arts community, and championing the creative visionaries among us."

BIOGRAPHIES

Victor Tolgesy Award Winner: Tam-Ca Vo-Van

Tam-Ca Vo-Van is a curator and film programmer based in Ottawa and is currently Director of the artist-run centre SAW. She has curated many exhibitions, including International Geographic, The Winter Life and Culture Crash, and co-founded the Electric Fields Electronic Music and Media Festival, the Art Star Video Art Biennial and the SAW Nordic Lab.

She has studied music at the Université de Moncton and ethnomusicology at the Université de Montréal. Tam-Ca is very active in the arts community and sits on several boards including the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives of Ontario.

Peter Honeywell Mid-Career Artist Award Winner: Marisa Gallemit

Marisa Gallemit is an Ottawa-born Filipina visual artist who "talks story", which is a Hawaiian expression described as "a rambling personal experience mixed with folk materials". She builds objects, designs site-specific installations, makes performances, and produces public artworks to triangulate our precise cultural coordinates, ever-shifting as they are, according to current local time.

Currently, Marisa is developing a temporary public art project centering around the Filipino community in Winnipeg for the Plug In ICA biennial, Stages 2023.

Peter Honeywell Mid-Career Artist Award Finalist: Christos Pantieras

Both an artist and an educator, Christos Pantieras creates sculpture, large-scale installations, and mixed media works that explore themes of communication, relationships, autobiography, and personal connection. He's been exhibited at several venues across Ottawa, and also currently teaches Visual Arts at Canterbury High School. He's received an M.F.A. in sculpture from York University, and a B.F.A. from the University of Ottawa.

Peter Honeywell Mid-Career Artist Award Finalist: Mis hka Lavigne

Mishka Lavigne is a playwright, screenwriter, and literary translator. Her award-winning texts have been produced in several countries, from Canada to Switzerland and Australia.

Mishka's play "Havre" won the Governor General's Award in 2019. Her text "Copeaux", produced in Ottawa in 2020, also won the Governor General's Literary Award in 2021 as well as the Prix littéraire Jacques-Poirier.

Emerging IBPOC Artist Award Winner: Velvet Wells

Meet The Velvet Duke - Velvet Wells is an award-winning Black, autistic, queer, disabled professional devised-theatre artist whose innovative productions have gone up on stages across Canada and the US.

Velvet's professional break was on Mr. Dressup in 1984. They've honed their identity and purpose, across multiple disciplines, ever since. And started Velvet Duke Productions, a transmedia company to feature their pieces in live and virtual spaces.

Emerging IBPOC Artist Award Finalist: Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman is an emerging Somali-Indian multidisciplinary artist. She is a graduate of Concordia University's Bachelor of Fine Arts whose work has been exhibited at venues and in private collections throughout Ottawa. Sarah-Mecca is currently an artist in residence with Bouclair and Art Volt. Her art practice involves both mixed media painting and video art and addresses her cultural history.

Emerging IBPOC Artist Award Finalist: Silvie Cheng

Silvie Cheng is a Chinese-Canadian pianist who has performed in esteemed concert halls on five continents, from the California Center for the Arts to Brussels' Flagey Hall, and the University of South Africa to Shanghai's Poly Theatre. Her affinity for collaborating with living composers has led to nearly fifty world premieres since 2010, in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Cornell University, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Project X, Photography Award Winner: Karina Kraenzle

Karina Kraenzle is a photo-based artist who has conducted her artistic practice here in Ottawa since 1995 and she combines multiple media with both original and found photography. Her recent studies in sculpture have heavily influenced her photography.

Karina has been the Artistic Director of Blink, a creative collective of artists who hosted over 100 exhibitions in Header House, in Major's Hill Park between 2005 and 2016.

Her latest exhibition was a collaboration with fellow artists, Cindy Stelmackowich and Andrew Morrow, entitled Stacks and Queues and was exhibited at City Hall Art Gallery in Spring of 2022, and was followed by a second iteration, entitled Stacks and Starts, at Galerie Art-Image in late Fall.

Project X, Photography Award Finalist: Joy Kardish

Joy Kardish explores the essence of stillness - the purest and most irreducible quality of the photo-image. Inspired by the enduring prints of early masters like Alfred Stieglitz, she blends painstaking historic photography techniques such as cyanotype, with contemporary media to create works that seem to transcend the flow of time and cut through its ephemeral distractions.

Joy's deeply poetic and personal images seem always to have been masking the passionate engagement with photographic craft required for their realization. Each work is the product of many hours in the darkroom, teasing out a richness of tone and quality of light that's only possible with classic photo techniques.

Project X, Photography Award Finalist: AM Dumouchel

AM Dumouchel holds a master's degree in visual arts from the University of Ottawa. She teaches art and photography in various institutions in the region. Winner of the Michel Goulet Award, she has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Conseil des arts et Lettres du Québec.

Her work has been presented across Canada and internationally. Her exhibition From Flesh to Bone was presented at the Art Image Gallery in Gatineau and she was recently selected for the exhibition A New Light: Canadian Women Artists at the Canadian Embassy Gallery in Washington D.C.

Community Arts Educator Award Winner: Jesse Stewart

Jesse Stewart is a composer, percussionist, artist, educator and community arts activist.

Jesse has received numerous awards and honours including the 2012 Juno award for "Instrumental Album of the Year" and the Order of Ottawa, and is the founder of "We Are All Musicians", an organization dedicated to providing opportunities for individuals and groups from marginalized backgrounds to make music, and has conducted hundreds of inclusive music workshops and performances throughout North America.

Corel Endowment for the Arts Award winner: Speaking Vibrations

The Collective, Speaking Vibrations, is a unique, contemporary, and genre-defying performance company that produces live performance and digital film works in ASL. Songs and poetry, music and dance, along with creative technology and design are used to create immersive and multi-sensory experiences designed to connect deaf, hard of hearing, and non-deaf audiences.

Speaking Vibrations is the next evolution of immersive and accessible performance art. They aim to disrupt notions of performance art categorization, of who can perform, who can enjoy and who can fully experience performance art.

Young Artist Award Winner: Asha Higginson

Asha Higginson's Visual Arts Department Head at Canterbury High School, Joanna Swim, describes her as a vibrant, motivated and creative student who would be a wonderful ambassador to other youth. Joanna highlighted her student's sculptural work, entitled "Mycelium". She believes the subject matter is important and timely, emphasizing our interconnectedness to the natural world.