An exhibition by Acadian artist Mathieu Léger at the National Gallery of Canada

From October 4 until March 16, 2025, Moncton-born artist Mathieu Léger is part of the special exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) dedicated to the six Sobey Prize finalists, the winner of which is announced Saturday in Ottawa.

Other artists finalized for the 2024 Sobey Art Award are Taqralik Partridge, Judy Chartrand, Rhayne Vermette, June Clark and Nico Williams.

Mathieu Léger is the only finalist from the Atlantic. His series of works Obstacles & Amendments is interested in the effect of time on matter.

In a room dedicated to him MBAits installation includes unpublished works from the last five years. There are drawings, prints, sculptures, audio stations and a battery.

Music plays an important place in his life and work. He says he spent a year banging his little drum sticks on pages of paper that transformed with wear and vibration.

In this process, what interested me was if I do this every day for a year, will my dexterity develop? Then the surface, the shape will change?he explains.

Alongside the drawings, two audio stations combining 360 recordings of these sessions are placed in layers, in a compressed one-minute loop becoming white noise.

I find it really interesting because it’s like a metaphor for the information chaos we experience in today’s world. It’s difficult to find a case or distinguish a case in all the news that hits us every dayhe said. We are living in a period that is quite accelerated.

Prize ceremony Saturday

The Sobey Prize jury qualified Mathieu Léger as conceptualiste and of minimalist. His work is an invitation to a slightly deeper understanding of personal, but above all collective, identity.

This reflection, explains the artist, arises from the perspective that an artistic activity can be passive and still be productive.

Saturday, for the unveiling of the winner, Mathieu Léger will also have the opportunity to meet the other finalists who came from the four corners of the country.

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The day before the prize was awarded, Mathieu Léger said he had no expectations.

If I had to win, it would be more fun to prove that it is possible, perhaps in Moncton, to have a career, then to be in New Brunswick, in Acadia, on the east coast, in Atlantiche said humbly.

Mathieu Léger recalls that this prize was created in Nova Scotia around twenty years ago, but has only been won once since then by an artist from the Atlantic provinces.

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By being a finalist for the prize, he has already won a $25,000 scholarship and exposure to the MBA is in a way, he says, the result of his previous work or precisely the provocation to reflect on time and our space.

All the works, it’s just a logical sequencehe specifies. Often I even use materials from the previous performance to follow up. It is a logical sequence of observation and then reflection on what surrounds me, society, the media, humans, the planet and time.

Time is what we value the most. Everyone wants to make a lot of money, but money is worthless at the end of your lifehe concludes.

According to the report by Jimena Vergara