Kristan Horton, a Toronto-based artist who creates by layering and manipulating photos, has won the 2010 Grange Prize.
The $50,000 prize, Canada's largest photography prize, was awarded Wednesday in Toronto. Horton won in a field that included two Canadians and two Americans, all chosen by curators at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. The winner is chosen by public vote, either online or by visitors to an exhibit of all the finalists' photos.
Horton's work ranges from digitally altered abstracts to large format images of manufactured objects. His work is full of visual jokes — an image of an airplane alongside an arrangement of cutlery and other objects that look like an airplane. The series he calls Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove reflects on what he calls "consumer debris."
"We're talking about layering inside the computer and each layer I deal with individually and where they meet they have torque," he said in a September interview with CBC News. "And then I cut through what stays behind by thinking as if they were encrypted on glass and stripping away bits and finally we have some kind of coherence, which is kind of kaleidoscopic."
www.thegrangeprize.com/grange-prize-2010
