Prix Pierre-Ayot and Prix Louis-Comtois: 2023 edition

Last updated December 1, 2023
Reading time: 2 min

The Prix Pierre-Ayot and Prix Louis-Comtois recognize excellence in visual arts. The city presents these awards in conjunction with the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC).

Prix Pierre-Ayot

This award, in the form of a $5,000 grant, is presented to a Montréal visual artist with less than 10 years of professional artistic experience.

Winner

Mara Eagle

Mara Eagle

Mara Eagle explores how Western philosophy and science have given rise to a concept of nature that has been adapted to industrialization, exploitation and colonialism. Through her multi-channel video installations, she investigates how practices of observation, description and representation create a dichotomy between nature and culture.

Photo credit: Mara Eagle

Les finalistes

Alexia Laferté-Coutu

Laïla Mestari. Crédit Mike Evariste

Alexia Laferté-Coutu’s sculptures are created by pressing clay or copper onto the surface of buildings, objects or historical monuments. They bear the marks of her hands, time, the environment and the deformations resulting from the process of transferring and reversing through different materials. Her practice reveals a dialogue between constructed narratives and sensory, intuitive experience.

Photo credit: Oana Stanciu

Joyce Joumaa

Joyce Joumaa. Crédit Clara Lacasse

Joyce Joumaa deconstructs elements of the geopolitical situation that marked her childhood in Lebanon. She communicates her perception of politics through video, her principal medium, while exploring how moving images can translate complex histories and structures.

Photo credit: Clara Lacasse

The city presents the Prix Pierre-Ayot in conjunction with the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC).

Prix Louis-Comtois

This award, in the form of a $7,500 grant, recognizes an artist who has made his or her mark on Montréal’s contemporary arts scene over the past 15 years.

Winner

Sylvie Cotton

Portrait Sylvie Cotton. Crédit : Josée Lecompte

Sylvie Cotton (in French) uses a variety of media in her practice, including performance and action art, drawing, installation and photography, writing and artist’s books. She is interested in encounters and presence, as well as their modes of appearance and embodiment. Her work focuses on the adventure of being present to oneself and to others, as well as to phenomena, whether material or immaterial, subtle or manifest.

Photo credit: Josée Lecompte

Les finalistes

Nelson Henricks

Portrait de Nelson Henricks

Nelson Henricks’ artistic universe includes photography, painting, drawing and video installations. Both poetic and ironic, Henricks’s work is experimental, but also grounded in popular culture. His new works express a quest to transfer materiality as a means of challenging conventions in aesthetics and representation.

Photo credit: Nelson Henricks

Dawit L. Petros

Dawit L. Petros

In recent years, Dawit L. Petros has devoted himself to a critical re-reading of the relationship between colonialism and modernism, through research on diaspora and postcolonial studies. These concerns stem from his lived experience. Petros was born to Eritrean emigrants, and lived in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Kenya before moving to Canada.

Photo credit: Dawit L. Petros

The city presents the Prix Louis-Comtois in conjunction with the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC).