GAP x SAR Award Winners:
Griffin Art Projects and the Similkameen Artist Residency (SAR) are thrilled to announce the recipients of the Griffin-SAR Residency Exchange Initiative awards! Join us in congratulating Wei Chang, Rachel Crane, Jennifer Wood, as well as curator Victoria Verge!
BIPOC AWARD @SAR
Wei Cheng is a Vancouver-based ceramic artist with a refined technical foundation and a deep appreciation of clays expressive potential. At the heart of Wei’s work is her observation of the fleeting moments of everyday life through deliberate unions of fired clay and found materials. She approaches material as both archive and language, exploring how form and surface can retain memory and meaning.
NORTH SHORE STUDIO AWARD @SAR
Rachel Crane is a mixed media sculptor based on the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Her work investigates how space is understood through objects and how distance, framing, and geometry function as a language that mediates the relationship between architecture and the human body. She also engages themes of text and humor, and reflections of her Guatemalan and mixed cultural identity, expressed through 3D forms.
ECU MFA GRADUATE AWARD @SAR
Jennifer Wood is a Vancouver-based artist who works with building materials to create environments that heighten sensory perception and unsettle familiar interior forms. Her practice considers how trauma is carried in the body rather than resolved through narrative, attending to the tensions between visibility and concealment. Through a critique of gendered labour, she examines the invisible work that sustains the private sphere.
OKANAGAN CURATOR AWARD @Griffin
Victoria Verge’s curatorial practice focuses on contemporary art in relation to place, shaped by feminist, decolonial, and artist-centered approaches. Alongside her curatorial work, Verge maintains a studio practice shaped by her upbringing in a Newfoundland military family. Working with sculpture and and installation, her work draws on domestic folk traditions to examine how militarized and patriarchal structures shape experiences of home, memory, and childhood.