Strathbutler Jury 2015

The Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation is honored to announce the members of the 2015 Strathbutler Jury.

In service to the province of New Brunswick, the foundation is committed to an independent jury system in the adjudication of awards and scholarships. We wish to express our respect and gratitude to the following professionals who served on the 2015 Strathbutler jury:

Tobi Bruce is Senior Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, having previously held positions in curatorial, collections management, research and education at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa) and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston). With over twenty years experience working with public collections, Tobi has curated over fifty exhibitions, researched regional and Canadian women artists and written for exhibition catalogues. She has lectured extensively on collection building and curatorship, general art history, and women artists, and has participated as a panelist at conferences nationally and internationally. Her most recent undertakings are Into the Light: The Paintings of William Blair Bruce (1859 – 1906) (2014); The French Connection: Canadian Painters at the Paris Salons (2011) and William Kurelek: The Messenger (2011-2012), a collaboration with the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria which was named in the top three exhibitions of 2012 by Editors at Canadian Art magazine. Tobi is currently co-developing with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre the exhibition The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists. A graduate of Queen’s (BAH Art History) and Carleton (MA in Canadian Art) universities, Tobi also served two terms as a Director with the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.

Hannah Claus completed her undergraduate work at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997 and obtained her Master’s of Fine Art from Concordia University in 2004. Her installations have been exhibited in artist-run centres and public museums throughout Canada, as well as in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Chile and Mexico. Her work may be found in the Canada Council Art Bank, the Contemporary Art Collection of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada, the permanent collection of Museum London (Ontario) and le Musée de la civilization (Québec). In her work, she explores the relationship between the material and immaterial to speak of identity and community, memory and time. Recent solo exhibitions in the past year include cloudscape at Modern Fuel (Kingston), chant pour l’eau at Vaste et vague (Carleton-sur-mer, QC), and touring group exhibitions include Reading the Talk, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, (Oshawa), and Territoires partagées at Action Art Actuel (Saint Jean sur Richelieu, QC). She currently sits on the board of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and has taught contemporary Indigenous art at Concordia University, McGill University and Kiuna Institute, an Indigenously-run First Nations Institute in Odanak, Québec. She is of mixed heritage (Euro-Canadian and Mohawk), and is a member of Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. She lives and works in Montreal.

François Morelli was born in Montreal where he completed a BFA at Concordia University in 1975. He lived in the New York from 1981 to 1991, and received an MFA in installation and performance art from Rutgers University (USA) in 1983. He has taught since 1980, exhibited his work locally and internationally since 1976. He has been professor at Concordia University’s Department of Studio Arts in Montreal since 1996 where he founded the Drawing Lab Dessin. He pursues a trans-disciplinary practice questioning the status of an artwork through its creative process and its reception. He is interested in notions of passage, circulation and transformation. His art often echoes a past action or event while examining (not only in space but also in time) relationships between the artist and society, between individuals themselves or between an individual and an art-work.