Simranpreet Anand: 2022 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize

Stamps graduate student Simranpreet Anand (MFA ​’24) was recently awarded the 2022 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize. The Lind Prize is awarded annually by North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery to an emerging BC-based artist working across the mediums of film, photography, or video, and comes with a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to produce a project with the Gallery.

Anand’s prize-winning works in The Lind Prize 2022 exhibition communicate in the language of everyday materials that have fraught socio-political histories. These materials invoke the personal and intimate nature of textiles and food, while subtly revealing the machinery of globalized commodity production that surrounds them. Her series of three woven dhurrie rugs, titled insatiable desires of a bourgeoisie, are crafted in seemingly abstract squares, creating pixelated images of spice mixes. Both dhurries and spice mixes were treasured commodities of a British middle class habituated to colonial plunder. In Anand’s 16-minute short film mukti maal kanik laal heera man ranjan kee maaiaa, hands delicately lay out an accumulating pile of sacred fabrics. As threads are pulled loose, the film lays bare the cheapness and wastefulness of the fabric’s mass production.

In Anand’s words: ​“My works build upon my prior explorations of photography as a play on how cultural knowledge can be inscribed in an abstract object — like the photographic exposure of tied turbans, or the continual alternation between stillness and culturally embodied movement. This serves to unpack some of the research that goes into my artistic projects, particularly how photographic process and material process can augment and subvert one another to generate new meanings.”