News Releases - 2004
Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert win Bell Canada Award in Video Art
Ottawa, December 20, 2004 – The Canada Council for the Arts and Bell Canada announced today that Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert of Montreal are the winners of the 2004 Bell Canada Award in video art.
Continuing its tradition of patronage of the arts, Bell Canada provides the Canada Council with an annual gift to fund the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art. The $10,000 prize has been awarded annually since 1991 for exceptional contribution by a video artist or artists to the advancement of video art in Canada and to the development of video languages and practices (videotapes, installations or web-based video art). Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert join the ranks of previous winners including Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour, Paul Wong, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Zacharias Kunuk and Norm Cohen, Sara Diamond, Luc Bourdon, Vera Frenkel, General Idea, and Nelson Henricks.
Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert were selected by a peer assessment committee of professional video artists: Lorraine Dufour (Montreal), Paul Wong (Vancouver) and Lisa Steele (Toronto). They were selected from a list of finalists recommended by a nominating committee consisting of Nelson Henricks (Montreal), Peggy Gale (Toronto) and Val Klassen (Winnipeg). A presentation ceremony will be held in Montreal in February. Details of the event will be available shortly.
Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert
Serge Murphy was born in Montreal in 1953. He has a Master’s degree in Design from the Université de Paris VIII. Mr. Murphy is a multidisciplinary artist involved in video, painting and sculpting who has exhibited throughout Canada (notably in Quebec), the United States and Europe. In 1983, he produced his first video, Le voyage à Thunder Bay, in collaboration with Michèle Waquant. He then went on to produce eight more videos with Charles Guilbert and Michel Grou. In 2003, he showed Le jardin de mon curé at the Musée d'art moderne de Lille Métropole in addition to having the Musée de Joliette organize a first retrospective of his visual art collection, currently touring Canada and Europe. A book of images and texts produced with Charles Guilbert, Le beau voyage éducatif, has just been published by Dazibao.
Charles Guilbert was born in Montreal in 1964 and earned a Master’s degree in Literature from the Université de Montréal. One of the many distinguished works of this multi-talented videomaker/writer/singer is Les Inquiets, a 1993 collection of stories published by Les Herbes rouges. His videos, on which he has frequently collaborated with Serge Murphy and Michel Grou, have been shown in numerous countries including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Mexico and Spain. Les Personnes, a video produced by Mr. Guilbert with Nathalie Caron, was shown in Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain, at the Third Annual International Photo Biennale in Tokyo, as well as at several European exhibitions. In 2003, Mr. Guilbert presented the video Sortir de soi at the Zamek Ujazdowski Art Gallery in Warsaw.
Speech is a predominant element in the work of Charles Guilbert and Serge Murphy. It can take the form of everyday anecdotes, scenes from contemporary life or literary references, evoking a world that is both tangible and imaginary. Spectators recognize themselves in the various tics and habits of the protagonists, in the stories that they tell themselves out loud, which are a sort of soliloquy where they confide in us and invite our confidence. Through these tragicomic scenes, the characters contend with a series of recurring themes like love, life, relationships and art.
While this technique of capturing reality in its purest form ties in with live filmmaking, and in a larger sense with the oral tradition, the environment in which the characters evolve is real in appearance only. Fantastic props and costumes play a unique role, obsessive figures of a discourse that does not succeed in expressing itself in words, distorting the immediate meaning of what is being told, as though tracing the silhouette of a parallel universe. The weight of the real is brought up against the imaginary, creating the bizarre impression of a world in suspension – a weightless universe. Speech itself takes flight at times, transforming into music and song, which are omnipresent elements of their videos.
General information
The Canada Council for the Arts, in addition to its principal role of promoting and fostering the arts in Canada, administers and awards prizes and fellowships to over 100 artists and scholars annually in the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural and health sciences, and engineering. Among these are the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, the Killam Prizes, the Killam Research Fellowships, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.
For more information about these awards, including nomination procedures, contact Janet Riedel Pigott, Acting Director of Endowments and Prizes, at (613) 566-4414, or 1 800 263 5588, ext. 5041; or Danielle Sarault, Acting Program Officer Endowments and Prizes, at (613) 566-4414, or 1 800 263-5588, ext. 4116.
Bell Canada
Bell Canada, Canada's national leader in communications, provides connectivity to residential and business customers through wired and wireless voice and data communications, local and long distance phone services, high speed and wireless Internet access, IP-broadband services, e-business solutions and satellite television services. Bell Canada is wholly owned by BCE Inc. For more information please visit http://www.bell.ca/.
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Bell Canada
Jacqueline Michelis, APR
Associate Director Media Relations
(613) 785-1427