The G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation is delighted to announce the winners of the Art Prize 2026: Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett from Canada, for their proposal Chronotopia.

Their proposal, unanimously distinguished by the Selection Committee from over 410 submissions from around the world, stood out for its strong conceptual grounding, the clarity of its artistic language, and its technical precision, as well as its sustainability.

The Artwork

Chronotopia is a large-scale, site-specific drawing from relationships between Crete and water, light, space, and time. The piece is composed of layers of optical lenses, wrapped in two arcing sails of light. The installation invites viewers to move through the space it creates and to observe the environment through the lenses.

From inside the installation, the lenses capture and focus distant images into domed micro-worlds, shifting in the wind.From outside the installation, the body of each viewer inside becomes a pixelated presence, an abstract ghost, part of a different mode of seeing. Here, the gaze, understood as a philosophical act of recognition, intertwines with visual culture, revealing how images and vision shape our experience and our relationship with the world.

Chronotopiaacts as a reflection on visual culture, bringing together elements associated with different modes of seeing. Through the coexistence of these varied viewing experiences, it constructs a field of multiple perspectives and perceptual frameworks, shifting away from the idea of a singular reality toward a more layered, complex, collective experience.

The spatial arrangements interact organically with the landscape, achieving a balance between the work and the space that hosts it, opening dialogues about the coexistence of human and non-human forms of life, between observer and observed, and between what we see and what truly exists.

About the Artists

Based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, in Western Canada, Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett have collaborated since 2010 on large-scale light art installations, public and environmental projects, and participatory works. Their works are exhibited extensively at museums, festivals, and galleries, nationally and internationally.

Caitlind r.c. Brown is an artist and cultural organizer whose work spans experimental public art and collaborative projects. She graduated from Alberta University of the Arts (2010), earning an Alumni of Merit Career Award in 2019. She has founded and led numerous projects, collectives, and collaborative partnerships including WRECK CITY, The Wandering Island, and The Hibernation Project, exploring site-specific, immersive, and participatory practices.

Wayne Patrick Garrett is an artist and musician whose multidisciplinary work includes site-responsive installations, sculpture, sound, and performance. He trained as a machinist at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and in jazz music at Mount Royal University.He entered into the world of contemporary art through theArbour Lake Sghool (sic) collective. Here he met Caitlind Brown and they began their joint career in the arts, collaborating on films and installations.

Their artistic practice focuses on the relationship between body, space, and time, with the landscape always functioning as an active interlocutor, co-shaping the conception, scale, and experience of each work. Their projects activate the space and engage the viewer, proposing modes of perception that emphasize the temporality of experience and the participation of all the senses.

Chronotopia grows on the artists’ previous lens-based works, Conversations with Time (Setouchi Triennale, Japan, 2025), A Whisper in the Eye of the Storm (Northern Alps Art Festival, Japan, 2024), And Between Us, An Ocean(Times Art Museum, China, 2021), and sea/see/saw(Pera Museum, Turkey, 2015).

The Selection Committee highlighted the proposal, noting that Brown and Garrett make a significant contribution to contemporary artistic discourse, proposing innovative methodologies and practices that bridge conceptual thinking with embodied experience and strengthen an interdisciplinary approach to art, expanding the boundaries between visual practice, environmental reflection, and social inquiry.

As the artists state: “We work in the interspace between things – nature and culture, intimate and communal, light and dark, sound and listening, me and you. Our projects are site-responsive, acknowledging the limited wingspan of our human experience through radical acts of looking, listening, feeling, and being. We believe in the utopian power of art to create new understandings of the everyday, closing the distance between people, and building our human capacity for empathy and insight.”

Information about the artists and their works can be found HERE.

Art Prize Selection Committee 2026: 

Sotirios Bahtsetzis – G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Artistic Director, Art Historian & Curator, Professor at the Department of Cultural Industries, University of Thessaly

George Gyparakis – Visual Artist, Professor at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens

Polina Kosmadaki – Art Historian, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Benaki Museum

Nikos Navridis – Visual Artist, Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts

Alexandros Psychoulis – Visual Artist, Professor at the Department of Architectural Engineering, University of Thessaly

Applications for the Art Prize open every Fall.