The Polygon Gallery announces winner of the 7th annual Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize

$10,000 cash prize awarded to UBC graduate Simranpreet Anand

JAN. 26, 2023 (VANCOUVER, CANADA) — The Polygon Gallery is pleased to announce Simranpreet Anand as the winner of this year’s Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, following an awards ceremony this evening. The award comes with a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to produce a project with the Gallery. UBC Okanagan graduate Aaron Leon and SFU MFA graduate Katayoon Yousefbigloo are runners-up, and will receive $4,000, while each of the other four finalists — Wei Chen, Sidney Gordon, Natasha Katedralis, and Jake Kimble — will receive $2,500.

Anand’s prize-winning works in The Lind Prize 2022 exhibition communicate in the language of everyday materials that have fraught socio-political histories. These materials invoke the personal and intimate nature of textiles and food, while subtly revealing the machinery of globalized commodity production that surrounds them. Her series of three woven dhurrie rugs, titled insatiable desires of a bourgeoisie, are crafted in seemingly abstract squares, creating pixelated images of spice mixes. Both dhurries and spice mixes were treasured commodities of a British middle class habituated to colonial plunder. In Anand’s 16-minute short film mukti maal kanik laal heera man ranjan kee maaiaa, hands delicately lay out an accumulating pile of sacred fabrics. As threads are pulled loose, the film lays bare the cheapness and wastefulness of the fabric’s mass production.

In Anand’s words: “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. 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.”

The winner and runners up were selected from seven finalists by a jury consisting of: 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 RoyBois, artist and Associate Professor in Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.

Regarding their decision, the jury writes: “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.”

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.

The Lind Prize 2022 is on view at The Polygon Gallery until Jan. 29.

Previous Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize winners are: Charlotte Zhang (2021), Laura Gildner (2020), Jessica Johnson (2019), Christopher Lacroix (2018), Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (2017), and Vilhelm Sundin (2016).

Photos: Alison Boulier

Press kit and photos
bit.ly/TheLindPrize

Press contact
Ines Min
604 440 0791
ines@inesmin.com