Andi Icaza-Largaespada is the winner of the second CAG Prize for an emerging artist selected from the graduating class of the BFA program at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Typical of the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, a new speculative photographic panorama is presented across our Nelson Street façade. Raising questions surrounding ethics and ecology, the image grows out of recent research into Nicaragua’s rapidly expanding mining industry and its connection to Vancouver’s own history of resource extraction, occupation and expansion. Icaza-Largaespada’s subtle insertion of an enigmatic figure pictured within the manipulated landscape suggests a symbolic defiance against the continued colonial exploits of a Vancouver-based mining company in Nicaragua. Shrouded in a golden material, the character at once surveys the scene and refuses our gaze, a quiet manifestation of implied resistance. As described by Unangax scholar Eve Tuck, “resistance is not simply bodies or events articulated against power, but is diffuse, plastic, ungraspable.”

The CAG Prize combines financial support towards production with a solo exhibition at CAG, and in 2017-18 is generously supported by the Peter Szeto Investment Group, BMO Nesbitt Burns.