An artist who is known for his photo, film and video installations that examine social reality and history was awarded the Audain prize Monday night.
Stan Douglas, a contemporary artist, was given the $100,000 cash prize before a packed ballroom at the Vancouver Club.
The Audain foundation also announced the funding of five travel awards worth $7,500 each for students in university-level visual arts programs in British Columbia.
Established in 1997 to support the visual arts mainly in B.C., the Audain foundation says it has issued more than $120 million in grants.
It says the foundation now includes grants for wildlife conservation with a special emphasis on grizzly bears.
The Audain prize is now one of three annual, six-figure Canadian cash arts awards, with the other two being the Giller prize celebrating excellence in Canadian fiction and the Sobey art award for a contemporary Canadian artist under the age of 40.
This year's selection committee included Curtis Collins (chief curator at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler), Kathleen Bartels (former director of the Vancouver Art Gallery), Scott Watson (director of the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC), John Tupper (director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria) and artist Susan Point, who won the award in 2018.
Past Audain Prize recipients include Susan Pointe Kipling, E.J. Hughes, Eric Metcalfe, Gordon Smith, Jeff Wall, Liz Magor, Robert Davidson, Rodney Graham, Marian Penner Bancroft, Takao Tanabe, Gathie Falk, Fred Herzog, Michael Morris, Paul Wong, and Carole Itter.
