Charlene Vickers, Hazel Meyer, and Michelle Sound among names on 2025 Sobey Awards longlist

B.C.’s Charles Campbell and Tania Willard are also nominated for the Pacific Region in competition for country’s richest visual-art award

Charles Campbell’s *Actor Boy: Travels in Birdsong*, 2017. View of performance and installation, Flotilla Artist Run Centre Conference, Charlottetown. ©Charles Campbell. Photo by Oakar Myint

Charlene Vickers’s *Big Blue Smudge*, 2021. Installation view, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. ©Charlene Vickers. Photo by Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery

VANCOUVER ARTISTS Charlene Vickers, Hazel Meyer, and Michelle Sound are among the 30 artists longlisted for the national 2025 Sobey Art Award.

The Canadian contemporary visual arts award nominees are part of the Pacific Region contingent announced this week by the National Gallery of Canada and the Sobey Art Foundation. The Sobey Art Award is the richest award in the country, carrying a total of $465,000 in prize money. (Five artists in each of six regions across Canada are nominated.)

Anishinaabe-Ojibwa artist Vickers works in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. She graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and from SFU in critical studies of the arts, where she later received an MFA.

Meyer’s practice encompasses installation, performance, and text, exploring the links between sexuality, feminism, and material culture, and often drawing on archival research. Last year at the Richmond Art Gallery, her exhibit The Marble in the Basement examined the legacy of iconic Canadian artist and experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland, focusing on a pile of marble scraps discovered in Wieland’s home after her death.

Sound is a Cree and Métis artist, educator, and mother who is a member of Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation in Northern Alberta. The interdisciplinary artist holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from SFU and a master’s degree in applied arts from Emily Carr University Art + Design. She currently has work in the Capture Photography Festival show Stitched, where she integrates traditional textile practices and beading with photography.

Tania Willard’s *Surrounded/Surrounding with Woodpile Score*, 2018. Installation view, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. © Tania Willard. Photo by Rachel Topham

Michelle Sound’s *Mother Land*, 2024, at Stitched as part of the Capture Photography Festival now on view at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art. Photo courtesy of the artist and Ceremonial/Art

Other Pacific nominees include Tania Willard, a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art, including collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and language revitalization work in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial projects have included Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2012, and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2021–2022.

Joining them on the list is Victoria’s Charles Campbell, the Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose sculptures, paintings, and sonic installations have been shown locally at 2021’s expansive Vancouver Special show at the Vancouver Art Gallery and at Surrey Art Gallery, in 2023’s Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity. Campbell is the recipient of the 2022 VIVA Award and the 2020 City of Victoria Creative Builder Award.

You can find the full cross-country longlist here.

Six shortlisted artists will be unveiled on June 3 and featured in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada running from October 3, 2025, to February 8, 2026.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is cofounder and editorial director of Stir. She is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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