Awards from the Foundation were first made in 2007. Awards have been made in years when funds have been available from the growing endowments, or when funds have been donated for specific annual awards.
These awards are made possible because of the generosity of our endowment donors. Thank you for your vision, commitment and support of Saskatchewan Artists.
We acknowledge the current and past volunteer Board of Trustees for their efforts in supporting the work of the Foundation.
In 2015, the designated endowment funds provided 5 awards of $6000 each and an award of merit of $3000 (Legris).
The Foundation gratefully acknowledges the expertise of the Saskatchewan Arts Board for the facilitation of the adjudication process.
NED BARTLETT (Regina) – Visual Arts
Ned Bartlett is an artist and educator. His multimedia interactive artwork focuses on audience participation and explores the discourses of collection and display to question the societal status quo. He believes that art is created in the interaction between piece and viewer, and he strives to create work that can serve as a facilitator for peoples’ positive and engaging experiences with art.
A multidisciplinary approach to art-making is essential to his work and research, feeding into both the conceptual and technical aspects of his artwork. The collaboration of art and science is of particular interest to Bartlett; he sees both disciplines as creative pursuits, each having the ability to comment on our world from a distinct perspective. The space where these two disciplines meet and cooperate creates a unique opportunity for problem solving and creation for Bartlett.
Bartlett earned an MFA from the University of Regina, Canada, and a MSEd from Johns Hopkins University. Bartlett also holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from American University in Washington D.C. and a post-baccalaureate degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has received grant funding from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts, Creative Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Arts Board, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and the Government of Saskatchewan’s Innovation Scholarship. Bartlett has exhibited installations and public art internationally in Canada, France, and the United States.
* Featured Artist
JOHANNA BUNDON (Regina) – Dance
Johanna Bundon is a 2005 graduate of L’école de danse contemporaine de Montréal (LADMMI) and a 2008 graduate of the Globe Theatre’s Actor Conservatory. Her practice includes choreography, dance and theatre performance, and teaching: movement, dance, and improvisation. As a choreographer, Johanna’s work has been presented by New Dance Horizons, Globe Theatre’s Sandbox Series, National Arts Centre’s Prairie Scene Festival, and throughout Western Canada as a part of the Prairie Dance Circuit (2014). She has also worked as a choreographer / movement director for numerous productions at Regina’s Globe Theatre (2008-2014). Johanna was a 2014 nominee for the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Emerging Artist Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Regina Mayor’s and the Business Arts Emerging Artist Award. Johanna is also one half of Dream Agreement, a creative venture with Jayden Pfeifer. Dream Agreement works within the guiding principles of improvisation to foster civic community and creative experience within the city of Regina.
The Foundation’s Award will support a three-month development process towards a new performance work. This new work, Live Duet, is a collaboration with fellow theatre artist Jayden Pfeifer. This three-month work term will include dramaturgical support from Joey Tremblay (Artistic Director, Curtain Razors) and an informal showing at the end of the process. Live Duet delights in and celebrates the formal elements of stagecraft and performance. Audience and performers are entangled in a live experience that reveals and revels in the behind-the-scenes subtext of stage spectacle and romantic relationship. At its core, Live Duet is a live theatre experience – often interrupted by its colloquial first cousins: tango, comedy, magic and marriage.
* Archival biography; no update available at this time.
SYLVIA LEGRIS (Saskatoon) – Writing
Through a growing body of poetry that delves increasingly deeper into human anatomy, into neurology and into the histories of dissection and medicine, the first and foremost preoccupation of Sylvia Legris’ work is language. How does one construct a poetry and poetic language from a corpus of knowledge and terminology that seems fundamentally non-poetic? This question is one that continues to drive her poetry. Her next book, The Hideous Hidden, will be published by the venerable US publisher New Directions in fall 2016. New Directions also published her collection Pneumatic Antiphonal in 2013 as part of their widely acclaimed Poetry Pamphlet Series. In 2006, her third book, Nerve Squall, won both the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Among her other awards are the 2014 Lieutenant Governor’s Saskatchewan Artist Award and, in 2012, the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martin Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement by a mid-career writer. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many periodicals and magazines, including The New Yorker, Granta, Poetry, New American Writing, The Malahat Review, and The Walrus.
The Foundation’s award will support the development of de Materia Medica, a series of poems that explore the history of apothecaries and plant-based “pharmaceuticals.” These poems are informed by early botanical and natural history almanacs that functioned not only as essential diagnostic manuals, but as adjuncts to astrological charts, planting and weather tables, and even the vagaries of folklore and superstition.
* Archival biography; no update available at this time.
BARBARA MENELEY (Regina) – Intermedia
Barbara Meneley is a prairie-based intermedia artist whose interdisciplinary site-responsive work engages with the landscapes and foundations of contemporary society and culture. Her work evolves through theoretical inquiry and contemporary intermedia art – installation, text, media, performance, sculpture, and dialogic practice. Barbara writes, exhibits, and develops creative residencies across Canada and internationally. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts (University of Regina) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (Queen’s University). Barbara is a sessional lecturer at University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada.
The Foundation’s award will support the development and completion of a series of interactive and kinetic book works. These book works are based on atlases created by the Canadian Pacific Railway and by the Canadian government, designed and used as guides for colonial settlers. The goals of this project are to engage and explore contemporary relationships to archival histories, to activate archival histories through viewership and viewer interaction, and to animate contemporary engagement with utopian themes of colonial recruitment. This project also explores the potential of viewer interactions with kinetic book works and investigates the ways that viewer interaction can affect the composition of artworks in the exhibition space.
* Archival biography; no update available at this time.
KARA UZELMAN (Nokomis) – Visual Arts
Combining materials and source information gleaned from our collective dustbin, Kara Uzelman’s sculptural works and installations are typified by a deep engagement with found objects, and material processes. Exploratory and experimental in nature, her work is guided by secondary research that crosses disciplinary boundaries and spills into the peripheries of readily-acceptable discourse, incorporating knowledges collected from mythic, folk, and speculative realms.
Since graduating with a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2004, Uzelman’s work has been included in DIY exhibitions, artist run centres, museums, commercial galleries and art fairs across Canada and Europe including those at Remai Modern, Saskatoon; The Power Plant, Toronto; Le Commissariat, Paris; Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin; Mercer Union, Toronto; and The Vancouver Art Gallery.
Long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2015 and 2017, she has received numerous awards, and has attended residencies at The Klondike Institute of Art (Dawson City, YT), Triangle (Marseille, FR), Mains D’oevres (Paris, FR), Mercer Union (Toronto, ON), The Bruno Arts Bank (Bruno, SK) and Les Ateliers des Arques (Les Arques, FR). Uzelman currently lives and works in the rural farming community of Nokomis, Saskatchewan.
* Featured Artist
JANINE WINDOLPH (Regina) – Interdisciplinary
Janine Windolph is an interdisciplinary artist. She is a Cree-German scholar with a Master of Fine Arts Interdisciplinary in Media Production and Indian Fine Arts where More Questions Than Ancestors: The Windolph Family began a journey of family history stories, such Diom, Joshua, and NFB’s Lifegivers: Honouring our Elders and Children (award-winning: Best of Saskatchewan). As a producer, director and editor, she also created Witiko Psychosis, RIIS from Amnesia (received in international festivals such as the American Indian Film Festival) and producer of multiple video projects. Currently, she is working on her first feature film as a Co-Producer, Co-Director and Co-Writer of The Land of Rock and Gold. In development is another chapter in her family story called Braided Histories.
As a performer, she is a member of the Collective Performance Storytelling (CPS) ensemble, and together performed TransActions and TransActions Memorial. Together with the CPS ensemble, Janine will organize, write and produce the project RIIS From The Ashes: Awakening of the Thunderbirds, which is a 20-minute performance that will be created over three months and presented June 23rd, 2016 for the RIIS to Action Symposium that is bringing artists together to bring awareness on the unmarked burial site and the legacy of the Regina Indian Industrial School (RIIS) that was in existence from 1891 to 1910 and that began in what was Regina, North West Territories. Janine has a strong sense of community work with a focus on residential school legacy. She has worked as a statement gatherer for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She is president of both mispon – an Indigenous Filmmaking Festival – and the RIIS Commemorative Association, INC. She currently works with the MacKenzie Art Gallery as a part-time Education Program Assistant.
* Archival biography; no update available at this time.