The Audain Prize Luncheon of 2022

The Audain Prize luncheon was yesterday and I was invited. I don't normally go to awards ceremonies. Like Thomas Bernhard, I believe awards are designed to humiliate their recipients, and I am not a schadenfreuder. Of the few I go to, I go to the Audain Prize, if only to find out why I was invited. But this year I went with better intentions, excited because I didn't know who the winner was and because I worked hard to protect my ignorance, saying no to those who knew and who were trying to get me to ask them.

Because I am chronically early, I  stopped by the VAG to renew my membership and take a preliminary sprint through Sarah Milroy's Uninvited exhibition of neglected Canadian women artists of the '20s, '30s and '40s, an exhibition I enjoyed in part because it renewed my belief that Canadian women were just as derivative as Canadian men when it came to comping on European and Indigenous Art.

With fifteen minutes before the luncheon I bumped into a longtime VAG staffer I hadn't seen since the start of the pandemic and, through the course of our conversation, was told of a cancer diagnosis and the inevitable odyssey that all of us cancer survivors go through. A very meaningful visit for me, with a big hug at the end. As I made my way to the VAG's Hornby Street exit I saw artists Angela and Michelle gathering themselves, and of course I went to them because I knew we were headed in the same direction.

Angela was very present on the Vancouver art scene when I began to pay attention to it in the mid-1980s, a time when the public wanted some of that Neo-Expressionst painting that had travelled from Europe to New York in the very early 1980s. Angela was a variant of that, only her surfaces, which combine found photos and mystical applications of paint, tend to be smaller in scale. As usual we get right to it, and Angela says something about the work of another artist that will have me thinking about that work for days.

The Audain Prize luncheon was held this year at the Hotel Vancouver's Saturna Room, a much smaller and appropriately cosier room than last year's luncheon at that other Fairmont hotel in Coal Harbour. I felt proud to be walking through the lobby with Ange and Michelle, both of whom looked good and happy. We turned the corner and saw an open elevator with its "up" arrow glowing above, and like children we ran for it, joining Jane and Ross inside, who we were happy to see, and then a much larger crowd as the doors opened a few flights later.

The winner of this year's Audain Prize is another artist who combines painting and photographs, only in his case, the unifying structure is not expressive but minimal, his debt not to Die Brücke but De Stijl (he did his MA on Mondrian). That artist is Ian Wallace, an influential figure who, at 79, is deserving of an award that has grown to honour a lifetime of achievement, as opposed to that tired old saw known as What-Have-You-Done-For-Us-Lately.

Whatever energy I expelled over the course of this two hour luncheon (I insisted on piloting our table into sheer and selfish madness) was returned to me in the form of the three delicious glasses of Chablis I downed with my farmed steelhead and pound of sugar desert. Disgorged from pubic transit at the Commercial and Broadway Skytrain stop, I walked the nine blocks home in a holiday mood I hadn't known since my last (pre-pandemic) holiday. With two blocks remaining I saw a truck filled with rubble. What at first I thought was a mirror turned out to be a picture of me -- about to be taken to the dump!