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What I Say
Peripheral Paintings
For me, these paintings contain innumerable possibilities. They are: perceptual experiments; a play between figure and ground, between forms and content, irony and beauty; a comment on censorship and the degrees of the forbidden; an attempt to put non-objective art in dialogue with representation; a play on Arthur Danto’s aesthetics; a challenge and embrace of semiotic theories of art; a bit of perversity, indulging in beauty while denying it; a way of revealing and concealing personal content; an attempt to reach the metaphysical through the material...
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Road Kill Still Life
I have been photographing dead animals since 2002, mostly birds and deer. I take these pictures on my many road trips between Regina and Winnipeg, and in a circle that I complete at least three times a year, from Regina to Saskatoon to Edmonton to Calgary and back to Regina. I also record the fallen animals that I encounter on my daily walks to and from work....
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Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?)
The title of this exhibition, Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?), wonders if Métis ought to be considered in the traditional ‘Cowboys and Indians’ dichotomy. At the same time, the bracketing of the ‘M’ word along with a question mark, hints that such binaries are artificial and often racist anyway. Perhaps Métis could be associated with this real and imaginary division but escape by also having an identity distinct from this battle. After all, for centuries mixed bloods have been on both sides of this divide and excluded from each at various times. Métis people are in and between dominant and Aboriginal cultures, races and histories. They/we are at once ourselves and these others who are our kin and neighbours. The fact of Métis disturbs easy divisions and definitions around race, culture, and ethnicity, being and belonging.....
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Wildfire
Most of my art production concerns issues of identity, especially the formation of masculinity. Initially (1988-98), I was interested in the representations of men in high art and in comic books, particularly the hero at the moment of defeat, collapse and death. In collage-based paintings, I often chose to show how high art narratives were echoed in popular culture, and how patterns of masculinity recurred through out time in Western culture....
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