Peter Powning RCA is a Canadian artist and sculptor working in ceramics, metals, and glass. Since 1970, he has explored a wide range of artistic forms while working concurrently as an activist and arts advocate. He attended the University of Connecticut, where his studies included ceramics and sculpture. In the mid-1970s, the Pownings began a sojourn in Europe, and in 1976 Peter enrolled at the Croyden College of Design and Technology in London. There, he expanded his artistic scope through the study of techniques such as mould casting, slip screening and photo silk-screening, and was exposed to new ideas in the pottery field. In 1977, he showed his work at the Warehouse Gallery in London, and, following the Pownings’ return to Canada, he began to hold solo exhibitions at galleries in New Brunswick, all the while experimenting with new techniques and materials. His first Canada Council grant supported a sculptural project with integrated voice and sound recording elements. Some of the sculptures later went to the National Sound Symposium in Newfoundland. Throughout the 1980s, Powning grew his artistic practice as well as connections in the Canadian art community. He was a regular participant at the One of a Kind Show in Toronto, where he made connections with galleries across the country. He began working with bronze casting, and by the end of the decade had built a foundry and glasswork facility at his home studio. He also began working extensively with the American raku technique. The 1980s also saw the beginning of Powning's participation in public art competitions, which to date has resulted in 17 public commissions in four provinces. By the 1990s, Powning's work expanded to include cast bronze, steel, slumped and cast glass, and clay. In addition to an increased focus on public sculpture commissions, Powning's more recent work has included experiments with breaking and reassembling of porcelain—a variation of the Japanese kintsugi technique—and images of altered books (in the ocean, baked, terra-formed).

Creator Id: 485
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1949
City: Sussex
Province: New Brunswick
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: USA
Province of Birth: Rhode Island
Gender: Male
Mediums: ceramics, commission, glass, public art, sculpture

Andrea Bolley is a Canadian abstract painter based in Toronto. Bolley's paintings are abstract canvases which take their inspiration from Colour Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still and Jules Olitski. Her work has been praised for the complex treatment of surface and depth. Bolley has made distinctive use of paper, both as a tool for the application of paint and in her "paper paintings", which incorporate a paper collage element. Bolley participated in the Art Gallery of Ontario's Artists with their Work program in the 1970s, for which she presented art workshops throughout the province of Ontario. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bolley worked closely with the painter Tony Calzetta and the two artists' work was paired in a number of exhibitions. Bolley's first major exhibition was held at the Pollock Gallery in 1977, and received critical attention for the artist's seriousness and ability to establish her own expressive voice within the tradition of colour field painting. A retrospective exhibition of Bolley's work was held at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in 1981. Solo exhibitions of her work have also been held at the Thames Art Gallery (2004), Gallery 132, Toronto (1994-2003), Gallery One (1984-1986), and the Pollock Gallery (1977-1980). Bolley's work is in major public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada Council Art Bank, Imperial Oil, Labatt's of Canada, and Toronto Dominion Bank.

Creator Id: 76
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Year of Birth: 1949
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Female
Mediums: painting

Dennis Ekstedt is a painter who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He received my Diploma in Fine Arts in 1986 from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C and my M.F.A in 1993 from Concordia University in Montreal. Ekstedt was the Eastern Canada winner of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2002 and my paintings are included in many public, corporate and private collections. He has had many exhibitions and have recieved numerous artist grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec. The artist's work is included in the publications Carte Blanche Vol 2-Painting (2008) and The RBC Painting Competition: 10 years (2008). He has worked with many art consultants, including Soho Art Consulting, Kalisher, Art and Objects, DAC Art Consulting and Tatar Art Projects. He is currently represented by Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary, Alberta and Mark Moore Fine Arts in Los Angeles, and have work with Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco.

Creator Id: 193
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1961
City: Montreal
Province: Québec
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: British Columbia
Gender: Male
Mediums: painting

Françoise Tounissoux is a visual artist.

Creator Id: 610
Year of Birth: 1947
City: Quebec
Province: Québec
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: France
Gender: Female
Mediums: painting, sculpture

Gordon Rayner was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter. His way of creating art was idiosyncratic and characterized by constant innovation and often by transformation of his medium. Later, he integrated realism into his practice. As a young person, Gordon Rayner learned to paint from his father, a commercial artist and weekend painter, and from his father's close friend, Jack Bush. He spent 17 years working in commercial art, starting with Bush's commercial art firm, Wookey, Bush and Winter. An exhibition of Painters Eleven in 1955, and especially the work of William Ronald, which he visited with his friend, artist Dennis Burton, at Toronto's Hart House Gallery (today the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Museum at the University of Toronto) turned him towards abstraction as did visits to the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), to see artists such as Willem de Kooning. Under the influence of the neo-Dada movement current in Toronto in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Rayner began to combine found materials with his paintings. In 1966, he began a new period in his work centred around images of Magnetawan, an area 200 miles north of Toronto, north of the Muskoka District. It provided him with a favourite painting place in which he could experiment with materials and technique while demonstrating how to refer to nature without copying it in his work. To express his feelings, he used oblique references, a thick and expressionist technique, and sometimes found objects. These paintings were intuitive reinterpretations of landscapes dramatically conceived. Rayner showed his work with Toronto's Isaacs Gallery. For this reason, he has been called part of the Isaacs Group of artists, which include, among others, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, John Meredith and Graham Coughtry. In the 1980s, his work shifted direction to a new interest in the figure. He began to reinvent this crucial subject of art for himself using dimensions of the inner, more spiritual self and obliquely explored realism in the context of the body, painting himself in inventive scenes. Some of these paintings are called the Oaxaca Suite, since Rayner lived in Oaxaca in southern Mexico in 1993 and 1994.

Creator Id: 501
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1935
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Beginning Year: 1935
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: commission, painting, public art

Roland Poulin is a Canadian contemporary sculptor whose work is characterized by its horizontality and weightiness. He took the entrance exam to the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, but when he was refused, enrolled in evening classes at the school. After two years of study, he was accepted into the day class. He studied there from 1964 to 1969. After graduating in 1969, Poulin worked as an assistant to painter Mario Merola. In his own work, he chose sculpture as his medium. A 1972 trip to Germany introduced him to American Minimalism. Later, Poulin made visits to cemeteries in New England and Paris, as well as to an exhibition of Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi in New York. He found in these monuments an inspiration for his later sculptures. From 1973 to 1981, he taught at Université Laval in Quebec City and in the Visual Arts department at the University of Ottawa (1987–2005). In 1994, the National Gallery of Canada organized a retrospective of his works, and in 1999, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal organized another major exhibition. Poulin's career as a sculptor falls into two main periods. In the late 1970s, his work leaned towards American Minimalism. His sculptures had simple forms and were made of inexpensive industrial materials such as glass, plywood, wire mesh and reinforced concrete. Concrete was his choice for an important series organized around a central empty space, with individual titles such as Without (1979, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec). In the 1980s, he applied a metaphorical language to his work, derived from reading Hymns to the Night by the mystic poet Novalis and visiting Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. His dark-painted wood sculptures with their simple forms recall tombstones or coffins. In addition, Poulin used expressive titles such as Lamento and La Part de l'ombre (The Shadow Side) (1985–1986, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec). Later pieces, such as Thresholds (1993, National Gallery of Canada) are increasingly oriented towards the spiritual.

Creator Id: 484
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1940
City: Sainte-Angèle-de-Monnoir
Province: Québec
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: sculpture

Richard E. Prince attended the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history. He began teaching sculpture and studio arts in 1973 and joined the faculty at the Department of Fine Arts (now Art History, Visual Art and Theory) at the University of British Columbia in 1975, where he is now a Professor. Prince’s artwork has ranged over a number of themes but pre-eminent is that of the landscape. It is not simply the landscape of direct observation but rather it is a poetic landscape that reveals the often hidden, underlying structure or examines the intangible systems and ephemeral phenomena permeating our experience of land and place. Aspects of the landscape which have been the subject of his work have ranged from wind and erosion to the aurora borealis and other cosmological events. Much of his work questions our assumptions about conventional images of the landscape and proposes unique, often mechanical or electronic solutions for its representation. Prince has been exhibiting his work in art galleries across Canada and internationally since his first solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1972. His works are in many collections, including the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon. His work has been acquired by many corporate and private collectors as well.

Creator Id: 489
Year of Birth: 1949
City: Vancouver
Province: British Columbia
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: British Columbia
Gender: Male
Mediums: installation, sculpture

Canadian sculptor Kim Adams studied painting at the Northwest Institute of the Arts (1974), the Kootenay School of Art (1974-1975), and the University of Victoria (1975-1977), where he received an MFA in 1979. At the University of Victoria, he was taught by teachers with competing aesthetics, Mowry Baden and Roland Brener. By 1976, Adams was an abstract painter, but knew that sculpture and installation were his future. Despite his formal education, Adams found much of his inspiration outside the classroom. Adams's sculpture work is composed of different parts: architectural structures, street events and miniature models of landscapes and architecture. His practice grew from creating miniature models in the 1980s to life-size sculptures and installations. In Toaster Work Wagon (1997), Adams assembled bicycles, lawn chairs, and parts of a 1960 Volkswagen bus. For his Autolamp (2008), he used the shell of a 1985 Dodge Ram which through holes which perforate it, gives light, transforming it into a glowing structure. The Mendel Art Gallery (now amalgamated into Remai Modern) acquired Kim Adams' sculpture Love Birds (1998-2010) in 2013 composed of 11 foot tall sculptures - made from water barrels, grain-silo caps, and parts of two Ford Econoline vans. Adams's work is included in many major public collections such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Remai Modern, and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Holland. His Brueghel-Bosch Bus (1997-ongoing, sculpture-installation) is permanently installed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. In 2001, he created a permanent outdoor work for the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2012, Adams received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize. In 2013, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2014, Adams won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Creator Id: 6
Year of Birth: 1951
City: Grand Valley
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Alberta
Gender: Male
Mediums: sculpture

William Pura received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University in Bloomington. He subsequently returned to Manitoba where he taught Printmaking, Drawing, Painting and Color Theory at the University of Manitoba School of Art until 2010. Stylistically his work has moved from landscape and figurative issues to geometric abstraction and then back again to more representational imagery. His years in Indiana were formative in many ways, but most significantly he began to explore plein air painting with the encouragement of his friend Richard Nickolson. Experimenting with watercolor, ink wash and oils, the hours spend in the soft atmospheric light of southern Indiana opened up a whole new awareness of color in the landscape. After moving away from his more abstract work, he again embraced the landscape, particularly the urban landscape, which allowed elements of abstraction in the architectural forms to be combined with three important elements: light – as a phenomenon that changes the appearance of objects, changes their colour and with shadow, obscures and creates a sense of mystery; perspective - a pictorial element that changes the viewer’s relationship to the various subjects in the images and can create strong emotional responses to those forms; and memory - a special location, a coming together of buildings and the natural landscape, some combination of elements that evokes a strong sense of place. The CCCA Winnipeg Artists Project was generously supported by the Winnipeg Foundation.

Creator Id: 493
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1948
City: Santa Fe
Province: New Mexico
Country: United States
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Manitoba
Gender: Male
Mediums: painting, photography, printmaking

Canadian sculptor Kim Adams studied painting at the Northwest Institute of the Arts (1974), the Kootenay School of Art (1974-1975), and the University of Victoria (1975-1977), where he received an MFA in 1979. At the University of Victoria, he was taught by teachers with competing aesthetics, Mowry Baden and Roland Brener. By 1976, Adams was an abstract painter, but knew that sculpture and installation were his future. Despite his formal education, Adams found much of his inspiration outside the classroom. Adams's sculpture work is composed of different parts: architectural structures, street events and miniature models of landscapes and architecture. His practice grew from creating miniature models in the 1980s to life-size sculptures and installations. In Toaster Work Wagon (1997), Adams assembled bicycles, lawn chairs, and parts of a 1960 Volkswagen bus. For his Autolamp (2008), he used the shell of a 1985 Dodge Ram which through holes which perforate it, gives light, transforming it into a glowing structure. The Mendel Art Gallery (now amalgamated into Remai Modern) acquired Kim Adams' sculpture Love Birds (1998-2010) in 2013 composed of 11 foot tall sculptures - made from water barrels, grain-silo caps, and parts of two Ford Econoline vans. Adams's work is included in many major public collections such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Remai Modern, and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Holland. His Brueghel-Bosch Bus (1997-ongoing, sculpture-installation) is permanently installed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. In 2001, he created a permanent outdoor work for the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2012, Adams received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize. In 2013, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2014, Adams won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Creator Id: 6
Year of Birth: 1951
City: Grand Valley
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Alberta
Gender: Male
Mediums: sculpture

Winnipeg, Manitoba Collaborators since 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are among Canada’s best-known performance artists. They were catapulted into the international spotlight in their 20s with the performance and film We’re Talking Vulva. Since then, their live work and videos have been exhibited in diverse venues as far-ranging as women's centres in Sri Lanka to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This Winnipeg-based duo has created installations (such as Archaeology and You for the Royal Ontario Museum), public art pieces (such as One Gay City, the subject of a Manitoba Human Rights Commission challenge) and books (such as Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World, Arbeiter Ring Press). To most, however, they are known simply as the Lesbian Rangers of Lesbian National Parks and Services. Their humourous, feminist and provocative work has been acclaimed as “one of the high-points of contemporary Canadian artistic production” (Border Crossings Magazine). Performance documentation and artifacts are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of History and the Dia Art Foundation, among others. They have also curated for institutions including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Centre and YYZ. Dempsey and Millan are the recipients of many awards, most proudly the Canadian Museums Association Award for Outstanding Publication and the Manitoba Arts Council Special Prize for Innovation and Excellence. The CCCA Winnipeg Artists Project was generously supported by the Winnipeg Foundation.

Creator Id: 167
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1989
City: Winnipeg
Province: Manitoba
Country: Canada
Beginning Year: 1989
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Manitoba
Gender: Female
Mediums: film, installation, performance, video