Quebec artist David Altmejd clutches a cheque for $50,000 and a plastic Sobeys shopping bag containing a bottle of champagne after winning the Sobey Art Award at the Nova Scotia Art Gallery in Halifax, NS, October15, 2009.PAUL DARROW
At 35, Canadian artist David Altmejd has already crossed a lot of thresholds in his professional life. Receiving his first artistic training in Montreal, he headed off to New York, completing his Masters in Fine Arts at Columbia University in 2001. Three years later, he appeared in the Whitney Biennial, in New York. He has shown his work in Grenoble, Barcelona, Istanbul, Cologne. He is represented by two of the best art dealers on the international scene: Stuart Shave/Modern Art (in London) and Andrea Rosen Gallery (New York).
Though he still lives in New York, he has, of late, been embraced anew by his native land. Two years ago, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, where his installation of labyrinthine mirrored structures, threaded with fine gold chains and populated by taxidermied squirrels, dismembered werewolves, Plasticine toadstools, and a cubbyhole full of leather-clad sex toys intrigued the public.
On Thursday night, he was awarded Canada's leading contemporary art prize, the $50,000 Sobey Art Award, at a ceremony at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, where 700 art lovers gathered to fete him.
Speaking just minutes after the Sobey announcement, as the crowd roared in the background, I asked him to review the big milestones in his life as an artist. Altmejd, who still speaks with a slight Quebec accent, turned the conversation with relief to what really interests him: his work.
"The real thresholds have happened inside my head, with my ideas," he said, "like the moment when I could see that a head could be the centre of the universe, that it could be an energy-generating object." What followed was a series of heads, erupting in crystal formations, signalling transformation, regeneration and decay.
"The next big threshold was around 2003 or 2004, when I realized that interior space could be as infinite as exterior space - that I could work inside an object, making it infinitely complex." A few years later, he had a similar epiphany about the human figure. "I came to see that it was the most amazing thing in the universe, particularly the body of the person you love."
He started making giants, like the one that lounged, in a semi-decomposed state, in the Canadian pavilion at Venice - a person with worlds inside him. Subsequent giants have stood erect, fashioned from shards of mirrored glass, seeming to deconstruct into abstract form.
The conversation turned to Louise Bourgeois, but his media handlers were beckoning, so I had one last question: When people look at his work in a hundred years, how will it be of its times? Could his collapsed human forms - densely encrusted with exotic materials - relate to the trauma of how we experience our bodies, with all our viral threats and genetic mutations?
"I never think about that kind of thing," he said. "I see my works as fundamentally hopeful, because they are about change and growth and energy."
Still, the future may hold some fears. "I was having a talk with a friend of mine last night, about what the world would be like after an apocalypse. My friend was thinking that people would form together into groups, to help each other out, but I was thinking that every person would be completely on his own. For me, the apocalypse would be extremely lonely." He paused, and the sound of the crowd swelled to fill the silence on the line. "It was interesting to me how we could imagine this so completely differently."
David Altmejd's work will remain on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia with that of his fellow Sobey Art Award contenders -Graeme Patterson, Marcel Dzama, Shary Boyle and Luanne Martineau - until Nov. 5.