2023 Sobey Art Award Exhibition

The award recognizes some of Canada’s most outstanding artists, as selected by a jury of museum and art professionals.

In collaboration with the Sobey Art Foundation, the National Gallery of Canada is proud to present works by five artists from across the country who have been shortlisted for the 2023 Sobey Art Award. 

Congratulations to Kablusiak (BFA ’16, Drawing), winner of the 2023 Sobey Art Award!

The award recognizes some of Canada’s most outstanding artists, as selected by a jury of museum and art professionals. Rooted in lived experience, the artworks reflect the finalists’ diverse backgrounds and unique ways of seeing, thinking and being in the world. 

Michèle Pearson Clarke’s installation presents the discomfort of inexperienced singers, pointing to the deeper lived anxieties felt by queer masculine women as they navigate socio-political landscapes. Séamus Gallagher casts a queer, non-binary lens on identities and habitations, fabricating and layering multiple realities through virtual and actual collage techniques. Métis artist Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill works across multiple media to draw out the political, historical and deeply personal contexts of everyday materials such as tobacco, blackberry juice and hair. Kablusiak explores dis/connections relating to Inuit Nunangat (homeland); the impacts of colonization on gender and the expression of sexuality; humour; and everyday life. Anahita Norouzi travels between Iran and Canada to research colonialism’s destructive legacies in Southwest Asia, and the impact of displacement – human and “other” – that results from cultural and resource exploitation.