"The Sobey Art Award highlights the brightest in contemporary art, and I am honoured to be witness to the exceptional work being discussed in its context," said Sarah Fillmore, Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Curator of the Sobey Art Award. "Faced with such a rich slate of artists from which to choose, the panel has worked hard to reduce the long list and advance these five finalists."

An exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal will feature selected work by the shortlisted artists from October 8, 2010 to January 3, 2011. The winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award will be announced at a Gala event at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal on November 18, 2010.
The 2010 Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel consists of: Grant Arnold, Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery; Jen Budney, Associate Curator, Mendel Art Gallery; Philip Monk, Director, Art Gallery of York University; Lesley Johnstone, Curator, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; David Diviney, Curator, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

About the Sobey Art Award
The Sobey Art Award, Canada's preeminent award for contemporary Canadian art, was created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation. It is an annual prize given to an artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated. A total of 70,000 CAD in prize money is awarded annually; 50,000 CAD to the winner and 5,000 CAD to the other four finalists. Since its inception, the Sobey Art Award and accompanying exhibition have been organized and administered by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. For information and artist bios visit: www.sobeyartaward.ca

About the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is the gateway to the arts for Atlantic Canada. Located in downtown Halifax, with a second location in downtown Yarmouth, the Gallery houses the Province's art collection and offers an array of exhibitions and programming. For information visit: www.artgalleryofnovascotia.ca

About the Shortlisted Artists

Brendan Lee Satish Tang was born in Dublin, Ireland and currently resides in Kamloops, BC. He holds degrees from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (BFA, 1998) and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville (MFA, 2006). Tang produces hybrid ceramic objects that combine meticulous craftsmanship, the ancient traditions of Chinese porcelain and French ormolu with motifs and forms from contemporary manga and techno-pop cultures. Within his work, Ming-style vases appear to be supported by robotic limbs and penetrated by rocket thrusters, tubes, tentacles and other Manga sourced motifs. Tang has exhibited in juried and invitational shows in Canada and the US, including at the Gardiner Museum (Toronto), The Power Plant (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. His professional practice has taken him to India, Japan and Trinidad, and he has lectured at conferences and academic institutions across Canada. Tang's work has been featured in printed publications such as Hi-Fructose and FUSE, and prominent blogs including Boing Boing. www.brendantang.com

Winnipeg-born and bred artist Daniel Barro uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to "manual" forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Barrow received his BFA in 1995 from the University of Manitoba and has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council's Victor Lartyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival's Images Prize. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of York University (2010) and the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2009), a group exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2010), and performances at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2010) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2009). Barrow was previously nominated for the Sobey Art Award in 2008. www.danielbarrow.com

Born in 1979 in Kenya, Brendan Fernandes immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from York University (2002), MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Western Ontario (2005), and completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007). Practicing in multi-media, his works address post-colonialism and question identity in globalized cultures. Recent solo exhibitions include Until We Fearless, Hamilton Art Gallery (2010), Relay League, Art Gallery of York University (2009), Pray For Us, Diaz Contemporary (2009), and select group exhibitions include Manif d'Art, The Quebec City Biennial (2010) and Accented, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2010). www.brendanfernandes.ca

Patrick Bernatchez is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans the media of painting, drawing, sound, installation, video and photography. Since 2006 he has been working on a number of large-scale multi-media projects that incorporate industrial architecture as the place settings for explorations of metaphoric metamorphosis, the changing nature of industry and power and reflections on death, decay and entropy. His work has been shown internationally in solo exhibitions in The Netherlands, New York, and Paris. In Canada his work has been exhibited widely at public art institutions including the Prairie Art Gallery (Grand Prairie, Alberta), the Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montreal), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and in forthcoming exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Galerie de l'UQAM (Montréal). He lives and works in Montreal. www.patrickbernatchez.com

Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton, British Columbia) and Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax, Nova Scotia) have been working collaboratively since 1994. They work in printed matter, critical writing, and curation, but their focus is on sculptural video installation. Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, including the Brooklyn Art Museum, NY, Impakt, Utrecht, The Power Plant, Toronto, the Walker Center, Minneapolis, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The New York Video Festival, and The Images Festival, Toronto. Their work has won many prizes nationally and internationally and has been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Bravo. It has been collected by many university libraries, including those at Harvard and Princeton. Duke and Battersby received Masters Degrees in Fine Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago and are currently teaching at Syracuse University. www.dukeandbattersby.com

Patrick Bernatchez’s latest series bears the working title Lost in Time and encompasses a large number of works that employ diverse artistic media. These are currently at very different stages of conception or realisation. A central element of the series is BW (BlackWatch, 2010), an unusual watch realised by Bernatchez in collaboration with the recognised clockmaker Roman Winiger. BW consists of an empty black watch-face with only one hand, which requires exactly one thousand years for a single revolution, so that its movement is imperceptible to the human eye. In Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Bernatchez is now presenting the first results of work on the Lost in Time project, entitled Die Zeit Verschlingt (Time Devours). The project interlinks tangible and abstract aspects of the phenomenon time and so creates a weave of differing dimensions of reality. Bernatchez’s project is an invitation to immerse ourselves in the dizzying labyrinth of infinity, including those dimensions of time that are incomprehensible to man. Patrick Bernatchez holds a fellowship from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Ministère des Relations Internationales du Québec in the context of our International Studio Programme. With kind support from the representative of the government of Québec in Berlin.