Here are the nominees for the Kippy Goins Award category of our 9th Annual EVA Awards! The Emerging Artist Award is sponsored by Perfect Day
Eastern Edge Gallery
Eastern Edge Gallery is a non-profit artist-run centre overlooking the harbour in the heart of St. John’s. The centre was created in 1984 by a movement of Canadian artists who decided to take charge of the way their art was presented. From installation to performance-based works, this gallery is the place to see something new, experimental and different. Eastern Edge does not sell art rather present art experiences that challenge, re-imagine, and celebrate contemporary art today. Eastern Edge is also a place where artists meet, support one another, and develop new skills. strengthening our artistic community on a social level. Each year the centre presents 7 main gallery exhibitions from local, national, and international artists, over 40 educational and social events, local artists in the Rogue Gallery, and the city’s only art festival, the annual Art Marathon (this year number fifteen!). Eastern Edge also host Destination Library, the only free public library to find art magazines in the city and a brand new hangout space called The Lookout. In 2014 Eastern Edge is celebrating its 30th Anniversary.
Christina Parker
Christina Parker began working with visual artists as a private dealer in 1981. In 1984 she established her first gallery in a small space on Queen’s Road called Contemporary Graphics that specialized in work on paper but later grew to include work in all media. The gallery soon outgrew its modest location and in June of 1989 the Christina Parker Gallery opened its doors in an industrial 1930’s warehouse space at 7 Plank Road. The expansive gallery space at Plank Road provided the opportunity for the gallery to expand the exhibition programming and its interest to reflect the growing contemporary art practice by gallery artists.
In July of 2011 the gallery moved to a new and most exciting space in the heart of the downtown. The new location at 50 Water Street has been an active and engaging space to exhibit contemporary art and to mount larger exhibitions that celebrate the accomplishments of the gallery artists.
The gallery philosophy has been to look outward in representing the gallery artists and to this effort has participated in the Toronto International Art Fair, the most significant annual event for contemporary art in Canada, since 2001.
This year the gallery celebrates 30 years of activity in presenting and promoting significant work by many important artists of the province and beyond and remains one of the longest established contemporary art galleries in Eastern Canada
Community Youth Arts Program
Administered by The Murphy Centre and funded by Service Canada, The Community Youth Arts Program is a visual art based, career development project for youth between the ages of 16 and 30. It is dedicated to life-long learning and employment training in the visual arts through community service as well as group and individual skills training. Participants in this program are creative individuals who need to develop or improve upon professional practices and employability skills while simultaneously exploring new career and life goals. CYAP helps participants apply for career and educational opportunities and assists in connecting them with professionals in the community that match their life goals or personal challenges. Providing a forum for community networking and support is an integral part of CYAP. We carry out various projects and work placements that benefit community organizations and events. As a result, CYAP participants become acquainted with local professionals and develop a stronger understanding of their cultural community and associated cultural careers.
CYAP adheres to a team-based workplace model and each participant in the program is paid minimum wage for 30 hours of work per week for the duration of the program. Administered by The Murphy Centre, CYAP has been operating since 1999 and is presently located at the HarbourSide Studio, 72 Harbour Drive St. John’s, NL.
Donald Beaubier was born and raised in rural Alberta and is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art & Design, the University of Calgary and St. Francis Xavier University. He first came to Newfoundland in 1968 to teach a nine-month jewellery program at what is now the College of the North Atlantic in Corner Brook and as a result has spent most of his working life here. Like the prairie in which he grew up, Newfoundland geography is uncompromising and difficult to deal with in totality. The reduction of the Atlantic marine landscape into discrete elements has been the foundation of the design vocabulary that has informed the majority of his work over the past thirty plus years, and much of his jewellery has been an examination of very small aspects of this very particular landscape… small tidal pools, little sections of gravel beach, drifts of sea grass, and even particular pebbles or specific plant forms… the constituents that make up the margin between earth and water.
Ever since I can remember I have wanted to be an artist. I have been involved in visual art since I was five years old when I studied privately with Paul Parsons until 1968. I then went on to study with Don Wright and Gerald Squires for the next five years until I moved to Vancouver to attend the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr School of Art) from 1972-1974. 
Pam Hall is a visual artist, film-maker and writer, whose work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, and is represented in many corporate, private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada. Her practice is interdisciplinary—including installation, drawing, object-making, photography, film, writing , social practice and performance. Her work has explored the fisheries, the body, female labour, place-making, the nature of knowledge and notions of the “local”. She was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University and spent more than two years there pursuing her research into how doctors learn to see the body. Her work is often collaborative and for more than a decade she has undertaken socially-engaged projects with communities in locations distant from the pristine space of the gallery, the studio, and the museum. In rural Newfoundland and Alberta, on wharves here and in Japan, in local fish plants and distant farmer’s fields, Hall has made work that involves many others as participants and collaborators. She has worked with doctors and medical students, fishers on both coasts of Canada, workers in the food service and fish processing industries, knowledge-holders in Western Newfoundland and was the only artist on an interdisciplinary team of scholars studying the crisis in the marine fisheries in Canada. She has also written and illustrated children’s books, is an award-winning production designer in the Newfoundland film industry, winning the first Director’s Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production Design for her work on Rare Birds. She was inducted into the Royal Academy of the Arts (RCA) in 1992 and has been teaching graduate students in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College in Vermont since 1998. She has lived and worked in St. John’s for more than forty years, where she recently completed her PhD at Memorial University undertaking research and creation that proposed visual art as a form of knowledge production. HouseWork(s)—a ten-year survey exhibition of her work is currently on display at The Rooms until September.
Will Gill earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Mount Allison University in 1991, with a focus on sculpture. 
Philippa Jones has been a St. John’s based artist since 2009. Prior to moving here Jones completed a BA in Fine Art and an MA in Interactive Art & Design at University College Falmouth. Jones’ diverse art practice has included and sometimes combines printmaking, painting, pen and ink, animation, art games and interactive installations. Central to Jones’ work is the exploration of constructed realities, active myth making and a celebration of wonder and the inquisitive mind. In 2013 Jones was favourably reviewed by Gloria Hickey in C Magazine for her solo show ‘MIRIAD’ at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery. The drawing ‘Miriad Island’ that featured in the exhibition was subsequently purchased by the National Gallery of Canada. Jones is represented by the Christina Parker Gallery.
Peter Wilkins (British, b. 1968) is a multimedia artist based in Clarke’s Beach, Newfoundland. Wilkins’ various bodies of work have been exhibited in public and private galleries across Canada and abroad, including The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (St. Johns’, NL), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown, PEI), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria, B.C), and Canada House (London, England). His portrait and landscape artworks are held in public and private collections in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France and Greece. In 2009, Peter Wilkins was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Memorial University (St John’s, NL). In 2011, his works based on the architecture of Toronto were exhibited as a featured exhibition of the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival (Toronto, ON). In 2013, Wilkins exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale in the Collateral Event, About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice, Will Gill & Peter Wilkins.
Kailey Bryan is a multi-media artist currently living and working in St. John’s, NL. She received her BFA with Honours from York University and was the recipient of the E. J. Lightman Sculpture Award and the Louis Odette Award for Sculpture. Kailey is a founding member of Toronto based collective Tongue & Groove, who create participatory installations with recycled materials, increasingly exhibited in public spaces. Kailey’s individual practice centers on commercially manufactured materials and the body, exploring ways in which bodies and environments – physical, social, and psychological – mutually construct one another. Moving toward installation, video and performance, she hums and haws about power, agency, and accountability. She loves critical discussion, large bodies of water, and puns.
Malin Enström was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and has lived in Southern Europe, North Africa and North America. The main focus of Malin’s practice is photography, for which she won an Arts & Letters Award in 2013. She recently had her first solo show, One of of Nine, which documented the lives and experiences of breast cancer survivors in Newfoundland. In her day job, Malin is a crime analyst at the RNC and a PhD student at Memorial University. Malin is represented by the Leyton Gallery of Fine Art.
Mike Gough was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, in 1985. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in 2007 and in 2009 graduated from Memorial University with a Bachelor of Education. Gough went on to attend Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England, and graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in 2010. Shortly after, he was invited to exhibit with Witham Gallery in London for an exhibition featuring ten emerging artists from the top graduate schools in the UK, showing the future direction of British art. His work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the UK and France, and is part of both private and public collections in England and Canada. Gough was shortlisted for the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Emerging Artist of the Year in 2013. In December, 2013 Gough opened his first public gallery solo exhibition, titled Retrace, at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery as part of the Elbow Room Residency Program. Gough is currently represented by Christina Parker Gallery.