PRIX PAUL-ÉMILE-BORDUAS 2010
BIOGRAPHy | Publication
Montreal, November 3, 2010
VOX is proud to have supported the nomination of artist Bill Vazan, winner of the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas, the highest distinction in visual arts, design, architecture and applied arts awarded by the Gouvernement du Québec. In recent years, VOX organized an exhibition and published a monograph of a retrospective nature that allowed the public to rediscover the artist’s Conceptual Art practice. The in-depth research on Vazan’s practice brought to light a rigorous and original body of work that had a significant impact on Quebec and Canada’s history and arts scene in the 1960s and 1970s.
A founding figure in Conceptual art in Quebec, Bill Vazan introduced various ways to view and make art, ways that were influenced by the thinking of Marcel Duchamp and by the aesthetic and Conceptual trends that were prevalent on the international arts scene of the mid-1960s. Continually seeking new image-making possibilities, Bill Vazan has spent forty years exploring new horizons and creating works that translate his inventiveness and sensibility to his environment. We need only look back to Worldline, which was simultaneously deployed in each of its locations on March 5, 1971. It created a virtual world line whose visible segments were installed at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Musée des beaux-arts d’Islande, and 22 other institutions, most notably in Croatia, Denmark, the United States, Finland, Hawaï, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Turkey and Yugoslavia. The artist convinced all of the project’s participants to affix black tape to the ground in order to virtually link the sites together. This global happening manifested a new, simultaneous form of space-time in a burgeoning society of global communications. Bill Vazan heightened our awareness of the communicative destiny of a world in which ideas are formalized and exchanged.
An official ceremony during which the laureate will receive his award will be held November 9 at the Quebec City Parliament Building.
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