Virtually visit the studios of three Sackville-based artists as part of Art Toronto's nation-wide programming.
Struts Gallery presents three brief portraits of artists introducing their practices and work spaces: geetha thurairajah lives and works in a refurbished schoolhouse on the edge of town, and alternates between living in Sackville and Brooklyn; John Haney (who recently relocated from Hamilton, ON) lives and works on his hundred acre property, which also served as the site for the Ark project, 2019; Graeme Patterson integrates work and life on his multi-building property, and is currently making a detailed scale replica of his home. A fourth artist, Adriana Kuiper, who lost her studio to a fire and built a new one beside her home, was filmed for the series, but audio problems prevented her inclusion.
Collectively, they provide a glimpse into ways of building an artistic practice in spaces beyond our city centres.
ARTIST BIOS:
geetha thurairajah (b. 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Sackville, New Brunswick. thurairajah studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design and Wilfrid Laurier University. Recent exhibitions include Soothsay, Unit 17, Vancouver; Ozone Gleaners, Projet Pangée, Montreal (both 2020); Migration is more momentous than ancient invasions, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; No body to talk to, Invisible Exports, New York; Downward Flower, Fourteen30, Portland (all 2019); An Assembly of Shapes, Oakville Galleries (2018); Mingling with flowers panthers’ eyes, The New Gallery, Calgary; Here’s Looking at You, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (both 2017) and Goodbye here no matter where, 8eleven, Toronto (2016).
John Haney’s work about place, trace, history, and stories takes the form of photography, sculpture, print-making, installation, and text. His work is sometimes reverent, sometimes irreverent, and process and materiality are always guiding principles. He lives in Wood Point, New Brunswick, on the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy, where last year he launched the nascent Wood Point Art Projects with its inaugural event the Ark.
Graeme Patterson was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. He graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2002. Initially self-taught in his development of stop-action animation using miniature figures, his multidisciplinary practice consists of animation, video, sculpture, photography, audio, music, robotics, interactive elements, and performance. Recently, he has focused on the creation of a large sculpture integrating a virtual-reality experience. His practice constructs an alternate reality stimulating reflective engagement with universal themes of longing, loss and recovery, and cultivating questions about dislocation, alienation and humankind’s fraught relationship with the natural world.His work has been exhibited and screened internationally at the National Gallery of Canada, MASS MoCA, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Galerie de l'UQAM. In 2012, he received the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Media Arts).