Happy times for artists

 

A reception was held Nov. 25 at the Morrow Gallery, in Old Montreal, to present the Dora Morrow Fellowship for Achievement in Visual Arts.

Last year, the inaugural award went to one student, but this year, $5,000 each was given to two rising student artists, thanks to a generous increase in the endowment by Mr. and Mrs Morrow.

Julie Gendron has moved here from Vancouver to complete graduate work in Digital Technologies in Design Art Practice. Her research involves the intersection of our virtual and physical worlds.

She worked during the ’90s as a graphic artist in Vancouver, and then became a communications consultant to non-profit organizations.

Interested in how documentary and storytelling could work online, she began to create her own documentaries on the Internet: What We Want, a story about Vancouver’s Woodward Squat, Swirling Uncertainty, and The Ties That Bind, with the National Film Board.

She began participating with the Intermission Artists Society, and helped this collective become a non-profit organization. Intermission works in improvised music, video and performance art.

Solomon Nagler came to Concordia’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema to finish his graduate work. He is a Winnipeg-based filmmaker who has worked with film co-ops in Winnipeg, Toronto, Vancouver and Warsaw. He has shown his work across Canada, in the U.S. and in Europe.

His work is reportedly gritty and colorful, pushing the limits of narrative. It often incorporates alternative film-process-

ing techniques, including hand processing, emulsion manipulation, and various optical printing techniques.

He has just served a year as the Winnipeg Film Group's Artist in Residence, in which he conducted various workshops on alternative filming techniques, and completed his eighth film, The Sex of Self-Hatred. This summer, his body of work was featured in a retrospective, Invisible Pulses, at the Winnipeg Cinematheque.

This is the second annual presentation of the award, given by entrepreneur Avi Morrow at the head office of Avmor, which is also an art gallery filled with eclectic drawings, paintings and sculptures.

The Avmore Group manufactures hand soaps and soap dispensers, sold and used in 28 countries around the world.