Steve Reinke wins $10,000 video art prize

Steve Reinke, celebrated video artist and author of Everybody Loves Nothing, has been awarded a $10,000 prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. Read on for the full story from www.cbc.ca:

Toronto video artist Steve Reinke, best known for his series The Hundred Videos, has won a $10,000 prize from the Canada Council for the Arts.

The council announced Reinke as the winner of the 2006 Bell Canada Award in Video Art — an annual honour recognizing outstanding achievement in the genre — on Thursday. Past winners include Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Vera Frenkel, General Idea and Paul Wong.

Reinke is to receive his award at a ceremony in Toronto in January. The award's peer assessment committee of video artists hailed Reinke as "one of the most influential artists currently working in video."

Reinke is associate professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and has held teaching positions in Canada and the U.S. His resumé also includes editing media arts anthologies and publishing essays and reviews.

"Mr. Reinke's work goes beyond his important tapes," the committee said in a statement.

Reinke's video art has screened and is held in collections around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Known primarily for creating single channel videos, he gained fame as a young artist for his The Hundred Videos project, in which he vowed, in 1989, to create 100 video art pieces by the time he celebrated his 36th birthday in 2000. Reinke completed the series well ahead of time, finishing in 1996. The jury also praised him for his mentorship of and dedication to young and emerging artists.