The Grantham Foundation’s New Horizons Prize
The Grantham Foundation’s New Horizons prize is given annually to a student enrolled in a 2nd cycle visual arts program at a Québec university. The prize includes a $3,000 bursary and a three-week exhibition at the Foundation with the other finalists. The winner is selected by a jury of experts in the fields of art and the environment.
2024 Winner — Mathilde Demoli
In 2020, Mathilde Demoli obtained a Master's degree in Research and Creation in Visual Arts (Université Jean-Monnet, Saint-Étienne, France), during which she completed an apprenticeship in taxidermy. She then moved to Quebec to continue her studies, graduating with a Master's degree in Visual Arts from Laval University. In 2022, she participated in Lab 3 at the Galerie des arts visuels (Quebec City) and in the group exhibition Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction at Art Mûr (Montreal). In 2023, she produced the exhibition Attention arsenic! L'exposition la plus dangereuse au monde (Alphonse-Desjardins, Québec), with the artist Vénetia and in collaboration with the collections of the Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval. Her project En éveil, in collaboration with the Department of Ornithology, will be presented at the Alexandre-Vachon Pavilion in April 2023, notably as part of the group exhibition Naturfact (Québec), curated by Geneviève Chevalier. His first solo exhibition, L'envers du décor, will take place at the Regart Center (Levis) in November 2023. At the same time, her work was exhibited at the 9th edition of the Foire en art actuel de Québec - Courtepointe.
Inspired by the aesthetics of curiosity cabinets and natural history museums, Mathilde Demoli explores the origins of taxidermy, its uses, and how to integrate this discipline into artistic reflection. Her practice is not limited to taxidermy, as she uses it as a subject of representation and associates it with painting, drawing or ceramics. Her work reflects on the living and the dead, the environment and the territory, art history and society. From collection to staging, her installations oscillate between museography and the artist's studio, cabinet of curiosities and diorama.
To learn more about Mathilde Demoli's work, click here.
Credits: Étienne Klopfenstein
2023 Winner — Bianca Shonoee Arroyo-Kreimes
Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes (aka Shonee) is a Montreal-based Costa Rican-Canadian digital media artist. Her creative practice as her work strives to resurrect the meaning of nature’s place in her own life now as both an urbanite and multidisciplinary artist. Within the virtual worlds she creates, 3D embodiments of organisms borrow shapes, colours, and stories from plants and animals within our own world, while remaining singular. This conscious decision is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world that humanity often takes for granted as her portrayals seek to embody humankind’s seemingly objective and narrow misunderstanding of nature in this time of ecological crisis.
Exploring topics of extinction and the commodification of nature, Last Species On Earth is a multi-channel video installation which weaves together a speculative reality where the last surviving specimens of plant and animal origin are kept in incubation chambers, situating viewers as zoo attendees. Last Species On Earth fragments the evolution of plants and animals as we know them today, following what natural selection would look like if nature were to adapt in total agreement with humanity's desire to domesticate it.
To learn more about the artistic practice of Bianca Shonoee Arroyo-Kreimes, click here
Photo: Richmond Lam