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Two Emily Carr Alumni Among Finalists for the 20th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition

Sdavidson Rbc 880Px
Sarah Davidson
The Garden at Night (detail)
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By Roxanne Toronto

Posted on July 05, 2018 | Updated April 27, 2021, 4:08pm

Congratulations to finalists Sarah Davidson (2015) and Tristan Unrau (2012)!

Since 1999, the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, with the support of the Canadian Art Foundation, has been a unique initiative that helps to bridge the gap from emerging to established artists. The competition focuses on supporting artists at the early stage of their careers and offers mentorship, financial support, and exposure to audiences.

The winner of the competition will be announced September 18 at an awards gala to be held at The Power Plant in Toronto. This year's top prize consists of $25,000 along with a residency at Banff Centre for the Arts. The two honourable mentions will each receive $15,000, and remaining finalists will each receive $2,500. Paintings by the winner and two honourable mentions will be added to RBC’s extensive art collection, featuring more than 4,500 Canadian works that have been collected since 1929.

“I’m continually impressed by the creative strength of the artists and the emerging talent who enter this competition. Having this opportunity to survey practices of artists from across Canada is an exceptional experience. As we continue to follow emerging artists who’ve participated in this program, we’re thrilled to be celebrating two decades of Canadian artists and their work.”

Corrie Jackson, Senior Art Curator, RBC

This year's jury was comprised of experts from across Canada, along with an international juror:

  • Natasha Chaykowski – Researcher, Writer & Curator, Calgary, AB
  • Mark Igloliorte – Artist & Assistant Professor, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC
  • Crystal Mowry – Senior Curator, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener, ON
  • Erin Stump – Director, ESP I Erin Stump Projects, Toronto, ON
  • Alexandra McIntosh – Director of Programs and Exhibitions, Fogo Island Arts, Fogo Island, NL
  • Julie Trudel - Artist and Assistant Professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC
  • Cynthia Daignault – Artist, Brooklyn, NY, US

About the Emily Carr Alumni Finalists:

Sarah Davidson

Working between painting and drawing, Sarah Davidson uses fragmentary shapes and gestures to embody an investigation of the relationship between nested systems of bodies, organisms, and entities. She is interested in depicting the tangled webs which often bind these things together: compositionally, creatures and space collapse in upon one another, suggesting a permeable biomorphism. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known--animals, plants, brush marks, lines--but are caught in a space of undoing.
She received her BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2015 and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Tristan Unrau

“In many ways I paint in opposition to the idea that the artist must contain a specific voice. A painting contains its own style, but why should the painter?” So states Vancouver-based artist Tristan Unrau, whose subject matter ranges from filmic nuns to Amsterdam office buildings to a crocodile crying salty tears—and whose approach could be read, across different canvases, as varying from photorealistic to fauvist to abstract. Unrau, who was also a finalist in the 2015 and 2017 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, recently graduated from the MFA program at UCLA and received his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2012. (Canadian Art)