When Sandra Meigs’s phone rang during a drive from Toronto to London, she didn’t expect to learn she had won a $50,000 visual arts prize.
“It was such a big surprise. It was like it came from heaven or something,” the Victoria artist said.
Meigs is the winner of the 2015 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO, announced Wednesday night at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. In addition to the $50,000, the award includes a solo exhibition at the gallery in 2017.
The award is presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada.
Juror Lesley Johnstone said Meigs is a “highly creative artist whose projects blend painting, sculpture and performance in a manner that is all her own. … Her work continues to surprise us.”
It’s been a banner year for the 62-year-old artist, who was one of eight winners of the 2015 Governor General’s Award for visual and media arts last spring.
Born in Baltimore in 1953, Meigs studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She moved to Canada in 1971 to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. For the past 23 years, Meigs has taught at the University of Victoria’s visual arts department, where she is a professor.
Meigs said she plans to use some of her $50,000 prize to create new works for her Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition.
“A lot of people don’t realize how expensive it can be to fund a project,” she said. She intends to create “something very spectacular” because it’s a large gallery space.
Meigs has had more than 40 solo and 60 group exhibitions in Canada and abroad.
Among her major recent works is a four-panel series, The Basement Panoramas. It was inspired by the death of her husband of cancer five years ago. One critic deemed the paintings “raw, fractured and inescapable.”
She recently exhibited a new project, All to All, at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto. Described by Meigs as “joyful and celebratory,” All to All includes 160 brightly coloured paintings, six chiming wall clocks, six mechanized biscuit tins with noise makers, 18 pieces of gypsum, six robotic figures and a gong performance.
Meigs said she visited Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto daily during the project’s Sept. 10 to Oct. 24 run to give a 15-minute performance with a gong.
“It was a joyful phenomenon for all the viewers. People would use it a pause for meditation,” she said on the phone from Toronto.
Meigs said she attempts to explore new territory with each project. Often, she said, people don’t know what to expect of her shows.
“I always do something quite different. But within that, there is a coherence to the work in an overall sense,” she said.
“It has to do with an interest in the psyche and also a sense of humour. And storytelling is a part of it as well.”
The Gershon Iskowitz award was established in 1986 through the patronage of painter Gershon Iskowitz, who died in 1988. Meigs said that prize and the Governor General’s Award represent a pinnacle in her career.
“But I feel like I’m only just getting started,” she added. “I have so much more to do.”
