Clive Robertson
Artistic Achievement Award
Visual and Media Artist, Cultural Critic, Historian
Kingston, Ontario
Ontario artist Clive Robertson and his work are featured in this video portrait by Alixandra Buck.
Highlights from the nomination statement
Nominators: Tomas Jonsson and Francine Périnet
“Pragmatic and theoretical, Robertson’s work is as much about the representation of community as himself.”
Photo credit: Clive Robertson Archive
“Robertson was a founder of the ground-breaking interdisciplinary artist magazine Centerfold (1976), which became Fuse: A magazine on art, media and politics (1980–2014). Centerfold and Fuse situated artistic production within its social context, becoming an essential source of information and critical discourse for people bridging new media forms and engaged practices.”
“Robertson’s artistic oeuvre, which spans audio, installation, video, sculpture, and performance work, exists as both in-context, and context-fluid.”
“Robertson’s particular synthesis of visual and media arts practices demonstrates an unfailing concern for the conditions in which artists produce and live. It represents a Canadian melding of the organic and bureaucratic—a hybrid towards an ethical trajectory that privileges patience and generosity.”
Clive Robertson, Parallax Glasses, 1969.
Photo credit: Clive Robertson Archive
“Robertson was influential in making the decentralized and democratized artist-run model a national objective.”
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