elc team
The G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation announces the winners of the 2026 Art Prize, Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett from Canada, for their proposal Chronotopia.
The proposal, unanimously selected by the Evaluation Committee among more than 410 submissions from around the world, stood out for its strong conceptual framework, the clarity of its artistic language, and its technical excellence, including its sustainability.
The Work
Chronotopia is a large-scale, site-specific installation inspired by the relationships between Crete, water, light, space, and time. The work consists of layers of optical myopic lenses forming two arched “sails” of light. The installation invites viewers to move through the space it creates and observe the environment through the lenses.
From within the installation, the lenses capture and focus distant images into domed microcosms that shift with the wind. Outside the installation, each viewer’s body appears as a mosaic, an abstract ghost that becomes part of a different mode of seeing. Here, vision as a philosophical act of recognition intertwines with visual culture, revealing how images and perception shape our experience and our relationship with the world.
Chronotopia operates as a commentary on visual culture, where the coexistence of elements related to different modes of seeing creates a field of multiple perspectives and norms, shifting the idea of a singular reality toward a more complex, collective experience. Its spatial arrangements interact organically with the landscape, achieving a balance between the artwork and its environment, while opening up dialogues around the coexistence of human and non-human forms of life, between viewer and viewed, and between what we see and what truly exists.
The Artists
Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett are award-winning artists based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, in western Canada. They have been collaborating since 2010, developing an interdisciplinary practice that includes in situ installations, sculpture, light art, public art, and environmental interventions. Their work has been presented in museums, festivals, and public spaces in Canada and internationally, receiving recognition for its aesthetic boldness and its dynamic integration into each landscape.
Caitlind r.c. Brown is an artist and cultural producer whose work ranges from experimental public space actions to collaborative projects. She graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts (2010) and received the Alumni of Merit Career Award in 2019. She has founded and coordinated numerous collective initiatives, including THE WRECK CITY, The Wandering Island, and The Hibernation Project, focusing on immersive and participatory practices.
Wayne Patrick Garrett is an artist and musician whose multidisciplinary work includes site-specific installations, sculpture, sound, and performance. He trained as a Machinist Technician at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and studied jazz at Mount Royal University. He entered the contemporary art field through Arbour Lake School, an experimental artistic collective in Calgary, where he met Caitlind Brown, marking the beginning of their artistic collaboration.
Their artistic practice focuses on the relationship between body, space, and time, with the landscape always acting as an active collaborator, shaping the conception, scale, and experience of each work. Their projects activate space and engage the viewer, proposing modes of perception that emphasize the temporality of experience and the participation of all senses.
Chronotopia further develops the artists’ ongoing exploration of vision, as seen in previous works such as 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 Evaluation Committee highlighted the proposal, noting that Brown and Garrett contribute meaningfully to contemporary artistic discourse by proposing innovative methodologies and practices that bridge conceptual thinking with lived experience and reinforce an interdisciplinary approach to art, expanding the boundaries between visual practice, environmental reflection, and social inquiry.
As the artists state:
“We work in the space between things-nature and culture, privacy and community, light and darkness, sound and listening, I and You. Our works respond to place, seeking to expand human experience through radical acts of seeing, listening, sensing, and being. We believe in the utopian power of art to create new perceptions of everyday life, to shorten the distance between people, and to build our human capacity for empathy and insight.”
The Art Prize
This marks the sixth edition of the Art Prize, an institution that aims to support artistic innovation not only through creation but also through the curation of artistic proposals and works, as well as their inclusion in an important collection.
Since its launch in 2019, the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize has supported contemporary creators, offering them the opportunity to produce a new artwork that will become part of the Foundation’s collection, open to the public. The Foundation’s Art Collection, which began in the 1980s, forms part of an important cultural heritage in Agios Nikolaos, Crete.
Previous recipients of the Art Prize include: Theodoros Zafeiropoulos and Giorgos Rymenidis for Come with the Wind (2019), Ileana Arnaoutou and Ismini King for Tender Shell Geophilia (2022), Maro Fasouli for Nomadic Murals (2023), Alexandros Laios for Day (2023), Ami Yamasaki for Whispers travel and whisper to you again (2023), Irini Miga for Landscape in Motion (2024), Katerina Nakou for The Resilient Thread (2024), Stratis Tavlaridis for Long Waves (2024), and Danae Stratou for the land art work Virtuous Spiral (2025).
The Evaluation Committee for the 2026 Art Prize consisted of:
- Georgios Gyparakis, Artist, Professor, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens
- Polina Kosmadaki, Art Historian, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Benaki Museum
- Sotirios Bahtsetzis, Artistic Director of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, Art Historian, Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly
- Nikos Navridis, Artist, Professor, Athens School of Fine Arts
- Alexandros Psychoulis, Artist, Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly
Applications for the Art Prize open each autumn and are announced through an international open call.
