I’m shortlisted for the SK Arts RBC Emerging Artist Award alongside 2 other amazing artists, Maia Stark and Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson.

A really big thank you to Rose Bouthillier, Shellie Zhang, Simon Fuh, Marcel Petit, Amalie Atkins, and Troy Gronsdahl for their kind letters of support 💗. I am very lucky to be surrounded by a community who teach me, inspire me, and keep me humble.

As some of you know, I have a strange relationship to awards: who does and doesn’t get recognized, who decides who’s worthy of praise. And it’s extra strange when it’s funded by a bank like RBC, who are one of the largest financers of fossil fuels in Canada. Artists deserve recognition and awards without strings attached to the destruction of our earth. We deserve compensation and financial support without being used as distractions from the harm that banks enable, especially on poor and indigenous communities. Artists aren’t sellouts for accepting opportunities funded by banks, banks are sellouts for putting money before people and the land. Don’t accept greenwashing, pressure banks to divest from fossil fuels. Switch to a local credit union, protest pipelines. If RBC gets upset with me for saying this, it just proves how they use funding the arts to silence criticism of their profiting from the extraction industry