Vtape’s New Governor General’s Award Winners for Visual & Media Arts:

Vtape artists Clive Robertson, Kent Monkman, and Bruce LaBruce join 35 other artists whose works are in distribution at Vtape who have received the award for Visual and Media Arts since its inception in 1999.

Previous Vtape-affiliated artists and arts professionals who are GG winners include: Marjorie Beaucage, Michelle Jacques (2024); FastWÜRMS (2023); Bonnie Devine, Cheryl L’Hirondelle (2021); Deanna Bowen, Dana Claxton, Ruth Cuthand, Jorge Lozano, Zainub Verjee (2020); Stephen Andrews, Marlene Creates, Ali Kazimi, Andrew James Paterson (2019); Midi Onodera (2018); Mike Hoolboom, Shelagh Keeley, Shelley Niro (2017); Jayce Salloum (2014); Gordon Monahan (2013); Margaret Dragu, Jan Peacock (2012); Barbara Sternberg (2011); Tom Sherman (2010); Nobuo Kubota (2009); Tanya Mars, Eric Metcalfe (2008); Vera Frenkel (2006); Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Paul Wong (2005); Eric Cameron, Istvan Kantor, John Oswald (2004); and Tom Dean and Jamelie Hassan (2001).

Highlight from nomination statement, nominators: Tomas Jonsson and Francine Périnet

“[Clive] Robertson was a founder of the ground-breaking interdisciplinary artist magazine Centerfold (1976), which became Fuse: A magazine on art, media and politics (1980–2014). Centerfold and Fuse situated artistic production within its social context, becoming an essential source of information and critical discourse for people bridging new media forms and engaged practices.”

“Robertson’s artistic oeuvre, which spans audio, installation, video, sculpture, and performance work, exists as both in-context, and context-fluid.”

“Robertson’s particular synthesis of visual and media arts practices demonstrates an unfailing concern for the conditions in which artists produce and live. It represents a Canadian melding of the organic and bureaucratic—a hybrid towards an ethical trajectory that privileges patience and generosity.”

Highlight from nomination statement, nominator: Naomi Johnson, Executive Director, imagineNATIVE

“Kent has inspired generations of artists and challenged larger Canadian conceptions of its history and its relations to Indigenous people.”

Highlight from nomination statement, nominator: Bonny Poon, owner, Bonny Poon / Conditions

“[LaBruce] continually transgresses and destabilizes any core idea of what a film is, what culture is, what family is, what sexuality is, what activism is, what art is.”