Fil-Can artist Lani Maestro receives Hnatyshyn Award

Fil-Can artist Lani Maestro receives Hnatyshyn Award

For Excellence in Canadian Visual Arts 2012

MONTREAL, Quebec–Montreal Artist Lani Maestro, born and raised in the Philippines, received the 2012 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award from Gerda Hnatyshyn, C.C., President and Chair of the Board of The Hnatyshyn Foundation, last November 19, 2012. The prestigious award is a $25,000 prize for outstanding achievement by a Canadian artist. The awards ceremony, followed by a reception, took place at the Bourgie Hall at the Musee des beaux-arts in Montreal.

The Hnatyshyn Foundation (http://www.rjhf.com), a private charity established by the late Right Honourable Ramon John Hnatyshyn, Canada’s 24th Governor General, began awarding grants in 2005 for excellence in Canadian visual arts and for curatorial excellence.  For 2012, the awards were given to Lani Maestro for excellence in the visual arts and to Nicole Gingras for curatorial excellence.

The jury of arts professionals from across Canada for this year were Robert Enright, contributing editor of Border Crossings Magazine; artist Michael Fernandes; independent curator Peggy Gale; curator and art historian Diana Nemeroff, and Stephen Horne, arts journalist, educator and visiting scholar at the Jarislowsky Institute in Montreal.

According to the Hnatyshyn Foundation, the jury found the work of Lani Maestro to be “initially intellectually enigmatic but sensuously resonant,” stating that “this formally restrained work is almost (in today’s context) elegantly classical in spite of the raw emotion sometimes embodied there. Many of Maestro`s works situate places within places as a means by which to have us travel in and out of the home, inside and outside space, hoping to erode binary opposition. In this sense, we might describe Maestro`s work as architecture of the body, with the proviso that such works, which emphasize passage rather than permanence, ultimately erode architecture`s claim to authority.”

In her art practice, Maestro has been concerned with questions of space – how we occupy it and how it occupies us—and of home by belonging or as difference; that is, by way of non-belonging.  Kathy Ko from Schema Magazine describes Maestro`s work thus: “Her style of art is most often a simple social statement, created so that the message is rendered to have an emotional impact on people.”

Robert Enright interviewed Maestro on stage as part of the awarding ceremony and the interview can be accessed here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm7ByKpX0S-FeWkO1bI5DeowmUOupCZef

Maestro has a BFA from the University of the Philippines.  She immigrated to Canada in 1982, studied at the Banff Centre for Arts in Alberta and pursued her MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her expanded art practice includes exhibitions, publishing, writing, teaching and running an itinerant gallery. She has represented Canada in numerous international exhibitions including Encounter: UK -Asia, The Royal Academy in Asia at the La Salle ICA, Singapore (2012), Sharjah Biennal, United Arab Emirates (2009), Mixed Bathing Worlds, The Beppu Project, Beppu, Japan (2009), Tempo ao Tempo, Museu del arte contemporaneo, Vigo, Spain (2007), Bussan Biennal, Korea (2004), Mind Space, Ho Am Art Gallery, Samsung Foundation, Seoul, Korea (2003), Shanghai Biennal, China (2000), Sydney Biennal, Australia (1998), Istanbul Biennale, Turkey (1997), and the Bienal dela Habana, Havana, Cuba (1994é1986) where she received the Bienal Prize in 1986.

Some of her recent solo shows include “Her rain” (she laughs), Plug In ICA in Winnipeg (2011), “Her rain”, Centre A, in Vancouver (2011), l’oubli de l’air (with Malcolm Goldstein), Fonderie Darling, Montreal (2010), cine-??ma, Campo Santa Margherita, Venice, Italy, Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal (2007), Sing Mother, Twilight Eats You, Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax (2006) and je suis toi., Eglise Saint Nicolas, Caen, commissioned by Wharf, Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-??Normandie (2006).

Her most recent collaborative exhibitions include Without a Murmur at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design,De La Salle College of St. Benilde which is on view until Feb 2013 and Digital Tagalog  at the Mo_Space  in Manila which ended July 2012. Maestro’s  forthcoming solo exhibitions include two commissioned site-specific works in Lorraine and l’Ardeche in France (2013) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manila and the Vargas Museum, Manila (2014).

At the invitation of the Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and the EAHR (Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group),  Maestro also delivered an artist talk at the Concordia University on the day following the award ceremony and met with students and artists.

Maestro lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Orgeres-la-roche, France, and Manila, Philippines.

(PRESS RELEASE)