Ron Bloore was born near Toronto in 1925. At the University of Toronto he studied Art and Archeology and wrote about ancient Chinese bronzes in 1949. He did post-graduate studies in New York at NYU in the early fifties. He finished his MA at Washington University and went to the Courtauld Institute in London and Paris to pursue a PHD, but in ‘57 he went back to Toronto to just teach. As he studied and taught, he painted and he drew in a fashionably abstract mode. In the summer of ’58 Bloore painted his first fully non-figurative work. “It was like bursting through the sound barrier,” he said. “Complete freedom. I knew I could paint that way - non-representationally - from that point on.” He left behind the abstractions of his youth and the expressionism he saw in New York for good. His new work featured bold composition, strong colour and striking uses of texture accomplished with paint scrapers, not with brushes, and stove-pipe enamel on panel. That fall Bloore was brought to Regina, Saskatchewan to teach and paint and direct the MacKenzie Art Gallery and in this latter capacity he brought himself, his gallery and four local fellow painters to national recognition. In 1961 the National Gallery mounted the group show Five Painters from Regina which travelled across the country. Soon Bloore had a solo show in Toronto, juried shows across the country and was included in international shows in London, Madrid and San Paolo. He received an Arts Council grant to spend 1962-3 in Greece. His extensive travels from there culminated in a trip to Egypt which inspired a second breakthrough. Relief. No more colour. He summarily destroyed all the work he had done on the trip and, back in Regina, destroyed most of his paintings there. It was the dawn of the “white-on-white” period. These were white oil paintings with minimal imagery and a sculpted surface with thick relief. Bloore moved back to Toronto in 1966 to teach at York University. In the following years He was very productive, including large mural commissions and was widely collected. He became an influential commentator giving many public talks, writing in artscanada magazine and serving on many juries. He advocated a new art which was aspirational not critical, questing not questioning. Retiring from teaching in 1986 freed Bloore for a 32 painting series of monumental works and a major retrospective which travelled across Canada. Through the nineties, he continued in the same mode but on a reduced scale, still mainly white and still with sculpted elements but with strong illusions of spacial depth as well. 2003 saw the fading away of white, the return of colours and the dark brown masonite, which had begun to show through the white, soon took over the field entirely. Bloore had found what he called “an old man’s style,” a shocking transformation and an aesthetic success which took him to the end of his days. He died in 2009.

Creator Id: 70
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1925
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: drawing, painting, sculpture

Edward Burtynsky RCA is a Canadian photographer. Burtynsky's photographs are included in the collections of over 80 major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; the Tate Modern in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. Burtynsky received his BAA in Photography/Media Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) in 1982, and has since received both an Alumni Achievement Award (2004) and an Honorary Doctorate (2007) from his alma mater. He is still actively involved in the university community, and sits on the board of directors for The Image Centre (formerly Ryerson Image Centre). In 1985, Burtynsky founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom rental facility, custom photo laboratory, digital imaging, and new media computer-training centre catering to all levels of Toronto's art community. Exhibitions include: Anthropocene (2018) at the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada (international touring exhibition); Water (2013) at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Art Center in Louisiana (international touring exhibition); Oil (2009) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (five-year international touring show), China (toured internationally from 2005 - 2008); Manufactured Landscapes at the National Gallery of Canada (toured from 2003 - 2005); and Breaking Ground produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (toured from 1988 - 1992). Burtynsky's visually compelling works are currently being exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the globe.

Creator Id: 105
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1955
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: photography

Colette Whiten is a sculptor, and installation and performance artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Whiten is a recipient of the Governor General's Medal. Whiten graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1972, and was a recipient of the Governor General's Medal. In contrast to the "Minimalism" of the 1960s and 1970s. Whiten's art included elements of performance in her sculptures by emphasizing the body processes involved in her work. She built stocks and scaffolding-like structures of wood, concrete blocks, and rope, each of which she designed with a particular male model in mind. The scaffolding would then hold the models' bodies in predetermined poses, while a team worked to cast them in plaster. In order to cast the bodies, Whiten would first shave the men and coat the body in petroleum jelly. The casts were then used to produce fiberglass body parts. For her 1972 exhibition at the Ontario College of Art, Whiten exhibited her body-part sculptures, along with the scaffolds that she used to create them, and photographic silkscreens and slide projections that she had taken to document the process of their creation. The effect was that the stocks resembled severed limbs, and the scaffolds torture devices. Until 1975 the performance of creating the work was often as important as the final cast. Although Whiten's work reversed the more common gender roles between artist and model, she denied that her work had a feminist agenda. One of her fiberglass pieces is a bust of a man sucking his thumb.

Creator Id: 644
Year of Birth: 1945
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: England
Gender: Female
Mediums: collaboration, commission, earthwork, installation, performance, sculpture

Joanne Tod RCA is a Canadian contemporary artist and lecturer whose paintings are included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Shortly after graduating from the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Tod was included in the exhibition YYZ Monumenta in 1982, an exhibition that spread over six spaces in Toronto's Queen Street West neighbourhood: A.R.C., Gallery 76, Grunwald Gallery, Mercer Union, Studio 620, and YYZ Artists' Outlet. This exhibition became a pivotal moment for the young painter's career. Tod is among a group of artists working in Toronto in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the Queen Street West neighbourhood, where Canadian artists across the country migrated, creating an energetic art community in the city. She has become known for her figurative paintings from photographs, using irony to challenge stereotypes, expose vulnerabilities and unsettle assumptions about women, race and social status. Her technical range as a painter was acknowledged early in her career and she uses her skill to surprise viewers by juxtaposing incongruous objects with well-executed representational images. Tod lectures at the Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto.

Creator Id: 607
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1953
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Quebec
Gender: Female
Mediums: painting

Tanya Mars is a performance and video artist. Mars is also known as Tanya Rosenberg. She was educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Sir George Williams University in Montreal, and at Loyola College, Montreal (now incorporated into Concordia University). Mars currently teaches performance art and video in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media in the University of Toronto Scarborough and is part of the graduate faculty of the Master of Visual Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Tanya Mars has been an active member of the Canadian arts scene, creating performance art and video works since 1974. She has performed widely across Canada, in Valparaiso, Chile, Mexico City, Sweden, France and Helsinki. Her work draws on feminist discourse and imagery, and often uses humour and satire. Mars' performance work received in-depth treatment in a 2008 critical anthology edited by Paul Couillard. Mars is a founding member of and director of Powerhouse Galleries (La Centrale) in Montreal, the first women's art gallery in Canada. She was the editor of Parallelogramme magazine from 1977–1989, and very active in The Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres for 15 years. During the 1970s and 1980s, Mars was a member and secretary of The Association of National Non-Profit Artist-Run Centres, a national lobby group for artist-run centres (1976-1989). She is a past president and member of FADO, a non-profit artist-run centre for performance art based in Toronto, Canada. Currently, she is also a member of the 7a*11d Collective that produces a bi-annual International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto.

Creator Id: 406
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1948
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: USA
Province of Birth: Michigan
Gender: Female
Mediums: performance, video

John MacGregor was an artist, known for his paintings, prints and sculptures, and as a member of the Isaacs Gallery Group in Toronto. He was trained at Central Technical School in Toronto and held his first solo show in 1967 at Toronto`s Hart House Gallery (today, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, part of the Art Museum, University of Toronto). Critics focused on his use in his early work of familiar objects to draw sexual analogies that were considered fascinating but humorous. He had subsequent shows at the Isaacs Gallery, to which he was introduced by Gordon Rayner and Graham Coughtry, featuring sculptured wood fantasies such as an arching door. By the mid-1970s, he had turned to abstraction believing it gave him the freedom to think and act differently. Critics often praised his colour-saturated abstract work, calling it a "delight". One of them even described the canvases as having a "Matissian flatness". MacGregor varied abstraction with returns in paint to his vocabulary of domestic objects. In 1993, he began to make large-scale sculpture of molded paper pulp and plywood as well as paintings and drawings, using the theme of time. MacGregor had numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 1983, John MacGregor, A Survey, was organized by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, B.C.. and traveled to York University, Toronto; Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, New Brunswick and Concordia University Art Gallery, Montreal. In 1993, Joan Murray organized a show titled John MacGregor: Painter as Time Traveller for the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa. In 1994, a show was organized by the Art Gallery of Peel, Brampton, and in 1999 by Gallery Lambton, Sarnia (today the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery). MacGregor`s work is in many public gallery collections such as the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum London, Ontario; the Winnipeg Art Gallery; the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa. In 1996, he created a sculpture for the former Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, Ontario. From 1968 to 1987, he was represented by the Isaacs Gallery and from 1998, by the Christopher Cutts Gallery, both in Toronto. In 1970, MacGregor and Gordon Rayner had a film titled Man at the Centre made about their efforts to survive. At different times, he taught at the New School of Art in Toronto; York University, Toronto; the Ontario College of Art, Toronto; and the University of Toronto.

Creator Id: 389
Year of Birth: 1944
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: England
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: drawing, painting, sculpture

David Pelletier is a Canadian artist, graduate of the Ontario College of Art and is a professor at the Ontario College of Art.

Creator Id: 467
Year of Birth: 1950
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: painting, sculpture

Jeff Nolte is a photographer and teacher whose practice is often centred around social and public spheres and expanding portraiture to encompass larger stories and ideas. With many of his works – as with The Mauro Years in the gallery below – Nolte captures both the personality and psychology of his subjects, in a moment in time but also often in terms of a progression of experiences and memories.

Creator Id: 449
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Year of Birth: 1950
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: USA
Province of Birth: Ohio
Gender: Male
Mediums: photography

Dianne Bos is a Canadian photographer based in Calgary, Alberta, whose works have been exhibited internationally since 1981. Many of Bos' photographs are produced using a homemade pinhole camera. These images are not intended to be an objective record of a particular object or place, but an attempt to capture a memory. For her Galaxies series, Bos experimented with photographing different light sources through multiple pinholes. Her 2001 work M51 by Candlelight depicts the Whirlpool Galaxy and is included in the New Mexico History Museum's Pinhole Resource Collection. She created the image using an aluminum plate camera dotted with dozens of pinholes of varying sizes. A photograph that Bos took in Toulouse was used by graphic designer Jennifer Clark for her mural Timeless. Beginning in 2014, Bos travelled to locations in Belgium and France to photograph battle sites where the Canadian and Newfoundland troops fought in World War II. The resulting photographs, also taken with a pinhole camera, were shown in a solo exhibition in the Lethbridge Art Gallery entitled The Sleeping Green: No Man's Land 100 Years Later. Bos is represented by Edward Day Gallery in Toronto; Jennifer Kostuik Gallery in Vancouver; Newzones in Calgary; and Beaux-arts des Amériques, Montreal.

Creator Id: 79
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Year of Birth: 1956
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Female
Mediums: photography

Gabrielle de Montmollin began her career in television and film but moved on to still photography when she discovered it was the medium best suited to her unique vision and independent nature. Her photographs and mixed media assemblages are composed of imaginative tableaux vivants featuring dolls, masks, toys and other objects in surreal narratives. Gabrielle has exhibited widely in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Since May 2012 she has been a member of the Red Head Gallery, an artists' collective in Toronto.

Creator Id: 163
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Gender: Female
Mediums: photography

David William Buchan was a Canadian artist who was part of the alternative art scene. He was also a graphic designer. He graduated with a B.A. Honours from York University in Toronto in 1972. Buchan lived in Montreal, Quebec, from 1972 to 1975 where he became fascinated with vintage clothes, particularly suits, which he began to collect. He returned to Toronto in 1975, quickly became involved with General Idea and from 1975 to 1985, he managed the art bookstore of Art Metropole which the group created. He also added to its archives and collection. During the 1970s and 80s, Buchan's work combined fashion, performance and multimedia art with a camp (style) sensibility. A 1978 performance piece, Fruit Cocktails, featured the persona "Lamonte del Monte" which Buchan would continue to use into the future. The name of the performance and the persona itself referenced a popular brand of canned fruit and the company that produced it: Del Monte Foods. Buchan also created photo-text pieces that parodied old advertising and commented on popular culture. In the mid-1980s, Buchan started making cibachrome transparencies and prints, and duro-transparencies, often large ones. These also frequently referenced advertising and historical artwork. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Creator Id: 95
Year of Birth: 1950
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Beginning Year: 1950
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: graphic design, performance, photography, printmaking

Robert Flack was an artist based in Toronto. He received his BFA from York University in 1980 and attended Sheridan College in 1984. Flack’s work was deeply concerned with internalized realms of psychic energy, the chakras, and the etheric body, which was influenced by the experience of his HIV seroconversion in 1988. In 1980, Flack began working at Art Metropole. Soon after, he began to exhibit at Toronto galleries and in 1982 was included in a two-person exhibition with Chrysanne Stathacos at Chromazone, a space co-founded by Andy Fabo. Flack was soon invited to exhibited nationally and internationally at spaces such as Das Institut Unzeit, West Berlin; Artist Space, Sydney; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Rutgers University Museum, New Jersey; and W139, Amsterdam. Notably, his exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum was an iteration of Group Material’s iconic AIDS Timeline exhibitions. He also lived and worked in New York, showing regularly in solo and group exhibitions with Hudson at Feature, Inc. Flack’s work has also been posthumously included in noteworthy exhibitions including Time is Thirsty, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Tributes and Tributaries 1971-1989, Art Gallery of Ontario; Par Amour/Paramour, curated by Jonathan Shaughnessy, National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Standing Ground (with Will Munro), Paul Petro Contemporary Art; The Temptation of AA Bronson, Witte de With; and The Cold City Years, The Power Plant. Flack’s estate is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Creator Id: 210
Year of Birth: 1957
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Beginning Year: 1957
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: painting, photography

Bruce Parsons is a painter and installation artist whose work has been exhibited in major Canadian centres. Strongly influenced by ancient art forms, his research has led to extensive travels in Egypt, Mexico, Guatemala and most recently, China. He has had several shows in China, initiated a faculty and student exhibition exchange, and brought several leading Chinese artists to York as artists-in-residence. Parsons has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions through out his long practice as a painter, printmaker, muralist and installation artist. He was part of Emma Lake workshops lead by Frank Stella, Ken Noland, Jules Olitski, John Cage and Clement Greenberg. Parsons was part of the conceptual art practice at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from early to Mid 1970’s. From Late 1970’s to late 2000 he was a Director of Graduate MFA programme and Associate Professor at Fine Arts Department at the York University. His extensive exhibition record includes solo and group exhibitions across Canada in both private, artist run spaces and public galleries as well as in exhibitions in Beijing, New York City, Hong Kong and New Castle Upon-Tyne, England. Throughout his career as an art educator he was responsible for installing more than 150 commissioned murals by Fine Arts Students at the York University campus.

Creator Id: 459
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1937
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Quebec
Gender: Male
Mediums: commission, painting, public art

Johanna Householder is an American-born, Canadian performance artist. Since the late 1970s Householder has made performance works and videos while writing and editing texts about performance art in Canada. In the 1980s, Householder, Louise Garfield and Janice Hladki were members of the feminist performance ensemble The Clichettes, using lip-synching and humour to critique contemporary culture. The Clichettes are considered "the quintessential Bad Girls of Canadian performance of the 70s" and have been called "dangerously and aggressively funny" by Clive Robertson. She continues to create performance works with a basis in humour and satire including On the Subject of Art, based on a text by Alain Badiou, Performance Festivals redux, and Portrait of a Situation, which was performed in Helsinki, Valparaiso, Chile, Budapest, Bratislava and Cluj, Romania. Householder helped to found Danceworks and the Women's Cultural Building in the 80s, and the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art in 1997. Householder is a professor in the Integrated Media Program, Faculty of Art at OCAD University, where she is currently Chair of the Criticism and Curatorial Practice Program.

Creator Id: 287
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Year of Birth: 1949
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: USA
Gender: Female
Mediums: performance, text-based

April Hickox is a Canadian lens-based artist, teacher and independent curator. Over the course of 37 years, April has mined the distinctions between personal and public sites through film, video, photography and installation. Her work with objects and the still life is rooted in narrative histories that individuals accumulate through-out their lives and the ability of inanimate objects to shape memory. This work continues in both photographic and video works with Provenance Unknown and Observation, and attributed a series of photographs and video works that explore still lives. April is also known-as a landscape photographer who explores notions of the wild and what we know wilderness to be. Over the years she has continued to document over-lapping layers of human and natural histories, to demonstrate how, with our help, nature is reinvented. She has produced numerous landscape series in Carolinian forest areas including Hancock Woodlands, Point Pelee and the Toronto Island where she has been engaged with an extensive series or work titled Invasive Species. An active community leader, she is the Founding Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, and a founding member of Tenth Muse Studio, and Artscape Toronto. For the past seven years she has been a member of the curatorial board of Art With Heart, Casey House. Currently April is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Notable recent exhibitions include Harbourfront Centre, Winnipeg Art Gallery, MacLaren ArtCentre, Oakville Galleries, Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Most recently her video work was shown at the Surrey Art Gallery in Surrey, BC. A survey solo exhibition of her photographs was curated by Crystal Mowry for the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Her work was recently included in the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s exhibition In Her Own Words curated by Tobi Bruce and featuring the work of several Canadian women artists.

Creator Id: 277
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1955
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Female
Mediums: curation, installation, photography, printmaking, video

Geoffrey James RCA is a Canadian documentary photographer. He was influenced lifelong by Eugene Atget and, like Atget, been fascinated with the built environment. Early in his long career, James made panoramic landscapes. They illuminated his subjects in black-and-white photographs, nature's spaces and the changes wrought by society on both its more idealized creations as in formal gardens as well as its darker side as in the asbestos mining landscape. His aims were two-fold, both "Utopia" and "Dystopia". Utopia/Dystopia was the title of his book/catalogue and retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2008. Around 2010 he was reborn as a digital photographer and his work, mainly of Toronto, though still intelligent and meditative, became more socially oriented. In 2016, appropriately, he was appointed the first Photo Laureate of Toronto by Mayor John Tory. For some years, James has been fascinated with the modern architect Jože Plečnik (1875-1957) and his architecture, especially the social places he created, in Ljubljana, Slovenia and exhibited photographs in shows about his work, both in Canada (2019) and abroad (2022). In 2023, James was described as a "consummate photographer with a distinctive vision."

Creator Id: 299
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Year of Birth: 1942
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: United Kingdom
Province of Birth: Wales
Gender: Male
Mediums: photography

Since the 1980s Peter Bowyer has produced installations combining drawing and sculpture, large scale works realized in public sites, simulated furniture and more recently animated film. In these numerous works he has re-contextualized aspects of the everyday world, borrowing from the spatial configurations and furnishings of food courts, shopping malls, subway platforms and departure lobbies. He has had solo exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (2006), The Art Gallery of York University (2003), The Toronto Sculpture Garden (2000), The Power Plant, Toronto (1995), Cold City Gallery (1999, 1996, 1992,1991,1989, 1987) and elsewhere.

Creator Id: 85
Year of Birth: 1956
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: commission, drawing, installation, sculpture

Noel R. Harding was a Canadian contemporary artist. He produced sculptures, installations, video works, and public artworks during an artistic career that spanned over forty years. Harding taught in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Guelph between 1972 and 1979, and in the Department of Experimental Art at the Ontario College of Art between 1977 and 1982. From 1984 to 1995, he taught at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunst (AKI) in Enschede, The Netherlands and at the Dutch Art Institute (ArtEZ) in Enschede, in the International Post Graduate Program. Harding's work is included in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council Art Bank.

Creator Id: 259
Year of Birth: 1945
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Beginning Year: 1945
Country of Birth: England
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: commission, earthwork, installation, performance, sculpture, video

Robin Collyer immigrated to Canada in 1957. He attended the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, in the late 1960s, and presented his first solo exhibition at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in 1971. Collyer's early black and white photographs, such as Shirley and Clint Eastwood, 1973, looked critically at the limits of the photographic image and its claims to authenticity. This questioning of what we are looking at and what it depicts continues to be a central element of his photo works. His early sculpture shows the influence of minimalism in its geometric design, abstraction and unadorned materials, but with the addition of narrative elements. By the mid-1980s, Collyer had moved further away from his early minimalism to include photography, found imagery and text on the surfaces of his sculptures. Constructed from elements and materials that retain some of their original associations, these discrete objects preserve an open-ended narrative and function as contemporary metaphors. The influence of photography is always present in his sculptures, as in Vacuum Cleaner Building (after Walker Evans), 1993, which reproduces an architectural structure from a 1936 Evans photograph. Photography, and in particular, digital imagery, has become part of both Collyer's sculptures and public works. Surfaces of objects have been covered with photographs (Round Ceiling Diffuser, 2000). A large public commission for the Canadian Embassy in Berlin uses a nature-based image integrated into the existing architecture (Canopy, 2005). Photographs and media images have been the starting point for three-dimensional constructions like Kennel, 2002 and Cell Door, 2005. Internet image searches form the basis for works such as Most Violent Places, 2005, and works in progress utilize digital tools to convert photographic images into 3-dimensional forms. Robin Collyer has exhibited his sculpture and photography across Canada and the United States, and in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England and France. In 1987 he exhibited at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, and in 1993 his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1999, an exhibition of Collyer's photographs was organized by the Art Gallery of York University, which then travelled to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Centre photographique d'Ile-de-France in Pontault-Combault, France. In 2012, Le point du Jour, in Cherbourg, France exhibited a large survey exhibition of his photographic work and sculpture.

Creator Id: 140
Year of Birth: 1949
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: England
Gender: Male
Mediums: installation, photography, sculpture

Francis LeBouthillier is a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist, designer and researcher. He was awarded his AOCA from the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) and his MFA from York University. Since 1989, Francis has been a Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches in the Faculty of Art. He chaired the Sculpture/Installation Program from 2007 to 2012. In his art practice, LeBouthillier creates interactive installations involving technology and performance to address gender/power hierarchies and issues related to the environment. Since 1986, LeBouthillier's installations have been presented in galleries throughout Canada, London England, Paris France, Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. He has also been the recipient of numerous artist grants and awards. Francis also maintains a research practice that involves developing high-fidelity surgical simulators and medical models. This work has involved research teams at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, Women's College Hospital, and the University of Toronto's Surgical Skills Lab. He has developed several simulators that are integral to refining the surgical techniques of obstetricians worldwide. His research work was selected by the Ontario Council of Universities to be included in their province wide Research Matters Campaign. In 2014, Francis LeBouthillier was featured in a Smithsonian documentary for his contributions in the advancement of surgical simulators in support of fetal health. In 2015 he was awarded OCAD University’s Award for Distinguished Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity.

Creator Id: 358
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1964
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Gender: Male
Mediums: installation, sculpture

Shelly Bahl is an interdisciplinary artist and decolonizing art trailblazer. As an artist, educator and curator, she has been leading and participating in BIPOC and feminist artist-run culture in Toronto and NYC for over 30 years. Bahl is the child of refugees of India’s Partition and her entire family was forced to flee Multan, Punjab at the end of the British Raj in 1947. She was born in Benares, India in 1970, raised in a few Indian cities, and later in Toronto, Canada. She is currently based in New York City. Bahl received her BFA (Visual Art and Art History) from York University, Toronto and her MA (Studio Art) from New York University. Her interdisciplinary work in drawing, painting, sculpture/ installation, performance, photography and video has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally. Bahl has taught studio art, art theory and art history at Saint Francis College (Brooklyn), Bard Microcollege, University of Toronto, Ontario College of Art and Design University, Alfred University, Pratt Institute and Vermont College of Fine Arts, amongst others.

Creator Id: 39
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1970
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: India
Province of Birth: Uttar Pradesh
Gender: Female
Mediums: installation, painting, photography

Ian Harris-Carr RCA is an artist, writer and educator. He has a B.A. from Queen's University in Kingston, a B.L.S. from the University of Toronto and AOCA from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Major solo exhibitions of his work have taken place across Canada and abroad. His writings on art and artists have been published in Canadian Art, Parachute, C Magazine, and Vanguard, among others. Primarily a sculptor and installation artist, Ian Carr-Harris' work investigates knowledge and ordering systems, often working with books and libraries, reflecting his early training and career as a librarian. In particular, his work reflects an interest in the intersections between memory and technology, often outmoded technology, which was a recurrent motif of Canadian art in the 1970s. Ian has been on the faculty of the Ontario College of Art and Design since 1964, and is a full-time instructor in the Faculty of Foundation Studies. He has received several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council, and is currently represented by the Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto.

Creator Id: 117
Year of Birth: 1941
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: British Columbia
Gender: Male
Mediums: audio, bookwork, installation, sculpture, text-based, video

Ric Evans works in the genre of geometric abstraction for the last forty years. Evans describes his practice as “orbital”, continuously referencing a central idea while bringing new observations and considerations to his work. Form and colour are combined in unique and playful combinations that highlight his approach of “informed intuition” inspired by his experiences and the natural world. Evans' work is included in many museum and corporate collections in Canada including the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2015, Evans completed a large-scale commission for a prominent lobby location in one of the Toronto Dominion Towers in downtown Toronto. Evans’ work is included in the highly acclaimed anthology by Roald Naasgard, Abstract Painting in Canada (Douglas & McEntyre, 2008).

Creator Id: 196
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Year of Birth: 1946
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: painting

Joan Frick. Frick was a graduate of École des Beaux-Arts de l’Université de Montréal with a Master of Fine Arts, avec Prix, in 1963. Her own words: “Of pertinent and long-standing value to my maturity as an artist are my continued studies in physics, mathematics and astronomy in addition to art, its masters and concepts, and my design experience in architecture and urban planning.” In her artwork, Frick “takes the technological principles of still film photography for a creative alternative ride with her handheld camera drawing lines in its space. Shooting her composition at the same time creating it – as directly as pen-nib to paper – Joan Frick draws her lines with a point of non-static light in the dark, moving her camera at will to form the lines, various in length, colour, angle and sweep that compose her art.”

Creator Id: 216
Year of Birth: 1942
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Beginning Year: 1942
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Female
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: commission, drawing, installation, painting, sculpture

Through her art practice, June Clark’s search for her place in the world is intensely personal but opens out onto the increasingly alienated world that we all share. Growing up in Harlem gives her a unique understanding of the contemporary world. The events of her life shape new understandings of the past. It is this encompassing self which gives her work its depth and relevance. Photographs, etchings, collage and 3D lead her to formulate methods of expression in order to communicate the intertwining of her past and her present. Clark’s practice has many levels and is never didactic. Clark pushes to integrate the direct knowledge and passion of her personal life with the public concerns of our time. Making art is a life commitment. Through her unique manipulation of materials she attempts to come to terms with the dimensions of personal experience. June Clark has earned a national and international reputation for her photo-based image works, installations and interventions. As an Artist-in-Residence she has spent more than a year in Paris, two years in New York City which included the Studio Museum in Harlem, and six months at OCAD. She has exhibited widely throughout Canada and abroad, including exhibitions in Ecuador, Austria, Paris and New York. She has taught studio and academic visual arts courses at a number of art schools, including York University, the University of Guelph, and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Clark has an MFA in visual arts from York University.

Creator Id: 128
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1941
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: USA
Province of Birth: New York
Gender: Female
Mediums: collage, photography, sculpture

Simon Glass is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University and teaches photography and cross-disciplinary art. Glass graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1983 where he trained as a photographer and visual artist. He completed an M.A. in Media and Communication at the European Graduate School in 2005. In his artistic practice original, archival and found photography is combined with mystical, liturgical and biblical Hebrew text. His work has also traversed sculpture and installation. In his current practice, he examines the poetry of Paul Celan and its relationship to the thought of Martin Heidegger. Glass’ work has been exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions throughout Canada and internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Creator Id: 230
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Gender: Male
Mediums: photography

Brian Burnett studied at the New School of Art in Toronto from 1974 to 1976 under local luminaries Graham Coughtry and Gordon Rayner. Burnett’s early work was largely figurative, and his fanciful, humorous, character-based paintings of gyrating colour placed him at the forefront of a return to figurative painting in Canada in the early 80s. Burnett soon became involved in the founding of ChromaZone, an artist collective in Toronto focused on figurative art. ChromaZone and the image movement that it spawned only added to Burnett’s reputation as an artist making new and exciting work. While Burnett continued to live and work in Toronto for most of his career, save for a brief stint in Vancouver in 1985, the artist went on to have extensive solo and group exhibitions throughout the decade at Isaacs and later at Gallery One on Scollard Street. As his subject matter evolved to capturing cityscapes, his artistic voice fully blossomed and critics and the public responded with resounding enthusiasm.

Creator Id: 102
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1952
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: digital, painting

Germaine Koh is a Malaysian-born and Canadian conceptual artist based in Vancouver. Her works incorporate the artistic styles of neo-conceptual art, minimalism, and environmental art, and is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places. Koh received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio in 1989 and theory and history of art in 1990 at the University of Ottawa. She later obtained a Master of Fine Arts in 1993 from Hunter College in New York. Koh is an independent curator and partner in the independent record label Weewerk. She also used to be an assistant curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada. Her exhibition history includes the Baltic Centre (Newcastle), De Appel (Amsterdam), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bloomberg Space (London), The Power Plant (Toronto), Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace (Sydney), The British Museum (London), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the Liverpool, Sydney and Montréal biennials. Koh's work draws the use of everyday objects and familiar concepts in order to examine how people interact with those they encounter while moving through the world. For example, her piece "Call", is an old telephone in a public space. When the phone is picked up it randomly dials a number of a participant that has agreed to have conversations with strangers at any time of the day.

Creator Id: 335
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1967
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Malaysia
Gender: Female
Mediums: curation, installation, painting, performance

Germaine Koh is a Malaysian-born and Canadian conceptual artist based in Vancouver. Her works incorporate the artistic styles of neo-conceptual art, minimalism, and environmental art, and is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places. Koh received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio in 1989 and theory and history of art in 1990 at the University of Ottawa. She later obtained a Master of Fine Arts in 1993 from Hunter College in New York. Koh is an independent curator and partner in the independent record label Weewerk. She also used to be an assistant curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada. Her exhibition history includes the Baltic Centre (Newcastle), De Appel (Amsterdam), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bloomberg Space (London), The Power Plant (Toronto), Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace (Sydney), The British Museum (London), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the Liverpool, Sydney and Montréal biennials. Koh's work draws the use of everyday objects and familiar concepts in order to examine how people interact with those they encounter while moving through the world. For example, her piece "Call", is an old telephone in a public space. When the phone is picked up it randomly dials a number of a participant that has agreed to have conversations with strangers at any time of the day.

Creator Id: 335
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1967
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Malaysia
Gender: Female
Mediums: curation, installation, painting, performance

Robin Collyer immigrated to Canada in 1957. He attended the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, in the late 1960s, and presented his first solo exhibition at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in 1971. Collyer's early black and white photographs, such as Shirley and Clint Eastwood, 1973, looked critically at the limits of the photographic image and its claims to authenticity. This questioning of what we are looking at and what it depicts continues to be a central element of his photo works. His early sculpture shows the influence of minimalism in its geometric design, abstraction and unadorned materials, but with the addition of narrative elements. By the mid-1980s, Collyer had moved further away from his early minimalism to include photography, found imagery and text on the surfaces of his sculptures. Constructed from elements and materials that retain some of their original associations, these discrete objects preserve an open-ended narrative and function as contemporary metaphors. The influence of photography is always present in his sculptures, as in Vacuum Cleaner Building (after Walker Evans), 1993, which reproduces an architectural structure from a 1936 Evans photograph. Photography, and in particular, digital imagery, has become part of both Collyer's sculptures and public works. Surfaces of objects have been covered with photographs (Round Ceiling Diffuser, 2000). A large public commission for the Canadian Embassy in Berlin uses a nature-based image integrated into the existing architecture (Canopy, 2005). Photographs and media images have been the starting point for three-dimensional constructions like Kennel, 2002 and Cell Door, 2005. Internet image searches form the basis for works such as Most Violent Places, 2005, and works in progress utilize digital tools to convert photographic images into 3-dimensional forms. Robin Collyer has exhibited his sculpture and photography across Canada and the United States, and in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England and France. In 1987 he exhibited at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, and in 1993 his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1999, an exhibition of Collyer's photographs was organized by the Art Gallery of York University, which then travelled to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Centre photographique d'Ile-de-France in Pontault-Combault, France. In 2012, Le point du Jour, in Cherbourg, France exhibited a large survey exhibition of his photographic work and sculpture.

Creator Id: 140
Year of Birth: 1949
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: England
Gender: Male
Mediums: installation, photography, sculpture

John Mckinnon is a Canadian sculptor.

Creator Id: 418
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
Year of Birth: 1953
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Ontario
Gender: Male
Mediums: commission, furniture, sculpture

Grover Timothy Whiten RCA is an American-born Canadian artist who works in the areas of sculpture, drawing, performance art and multi-media installations, using a wide range of materials. He also has been an educator. He graduated with a B.S. from Central Michigan University in 1964, and a M.F.A. from the University of Oregon in 1966. During his undergraduate years in CMU's School of Applied Arts and Sciences, he had sought to become a psychologist studying with Dr. Charles P. Poole and Dr. Oscar Oppenheimer. While in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts / Faculty of Graduate Studies at the UofO, he studied with noted Czech sculptor Jan Zach. In 1968, after completing military service as a commissioned Officer in the U.S. Army, Whiten was successful in his application for a teaching position at York University in Toronto and was appointed to the Faculty of Arts in the Division of the Humanities. In 1970, he became one of the pioneer members of the newly formed Faculty of Fine Arts, having been appointed to the new faculty in the Department of Visual Arts with a cross-appointment to the Faculty of Arts. He served as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts between 1984 and 1986. In 2007, with 39 years of teaching at York University, long after having achieved the rank of Full Professor, he retired from full time teaching and currently holds the status of Professor Emeritus. Whiten does not consider himself an artist but an "image maker who also creates cultural objects" and to this end, has studied Zen Buddhism and the Kabbala. His choice of materials comes from everyday experiences and many of his objects are either tools or toys. These objects, representing work and play, and which can include a broom, shovel, pickaxe, rolling pin, rocking horse, tricycle, and sled, are meant to take the viewer to another place. He considers the transcendental a key to his work. Whiten has used the human skull in his art since the 1970s. Rather than the skull representing memento mori, Whiten feels that in his work, it is "concerned with the potential in life and a reverence for those who proceed us." The focus of Whiten's artistic output is the "human condition and the interconnectivity of the body, the spirit and the earth."

Creator Id: 645
Year of Birth: 1941
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: USA
Province of Birth: Michigan
Gender: Male
Mediums: drawing, installation, media, performance, sculpture

Rita Letendre's work evolved along with her studies in art and association with various artistic movements, including that of Paul-Émile Borduas’ automatistes. Her many exhibitions in Canada and abroad—she spent time in France, Italy, Israel and the United States before finally settling in Toronto in 1970—have made her a key artist of the country’s postwar period. She is the recipient of a 2010 Governor General’s Award, the highest honour granted to Canadian visual artists. In 1954, her work was included in the major automatiste exhibition La matière chante, where it attracted the attention of the critic Rodolphe de Repentigny. Her first solo show took place at the Montreal gallery L’Échourie in 1955; later, in 1961, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented a selection of her large-sized works. Since then, numerous solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as in Israel, the United States (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Detroit and Chicago), France, Italy, and other countries. Her artistic career has been characterized by a consistency of approach that has taken her from the structured, gestural abstraction of the 1950s and early 1960s to the hard-edge and geometric abstraction of the late 1960s and the 1970s, when she developed her preferred motif—the arrow. Since that time, her work has moved toward a new form of gesture through the oblique, in which the electrifying power of colour and dynamic composition are constants. An artist of exemplary energy, she has worked with a wide variety of media and techniques, including oil, acrylic, casein, pastel, airbrushing and screen-printing. A number of large-scale outdoor murals that she executed in various locations in Canada and the United States between 1965 and 1980 further cemented her renown.

Creator Id: 363
Year of Birth: 1928
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Country of Birth: Canada
Province of Birth: Quebec
Additional Statuses: First Nations
Gender: Female
Mediums: painting, printmaking

Evan Levy is a Canadian sculptor. Levy's cold rolled steel sculptures appeal to our tactile as well as poetic sensibilities. His work is strong, tense and assertive while at the same time, lyrical and sublime. Levy's eye gripping sculptures confront the viewer with their strength, but leave us feeling ambiguous in that they appear to be on the verge of springing apart under the stress employed by the artist. These are precarious works which leave the viewer to doubt their weightiness. They appear to have a life all of their own. Levy's ability to achieve this dichotomy with his material is astounding. Evan Levy's poetry is an amalgamation of the influences processed and transformed by the artist. First of all, Levy is a nationalist and not an-insincere one at that. Apart from his affirmed beliefs about his country and its people's abilities, Levy draws a great deal of inspiration from the northern landscape. He states that, "As a nationalist, Canadian content isn't a choice, it is inevitable that 'Canadian' images are the most powerful for me...Canada is a country of wind and water - these are images of the north" For a city-weaned fellow, Levy captures these images extremely well, albeit with romantic apperception.

Creator Id: 369
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Gender: Male
Mediums: sculpture

Joseph Muscat graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1981, and since then has exhibited his work extensively in solo and in group exhibitions in Canada, USA, Europe and South America. His work is widely collected in many Public, Corporate and Private collections. He has received numerous Ontario Arts Council grants and his work has been included in art textbooks and reproduced on book and magazine covers. He has lectured at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture and has taught Visual Arts part-time with the Toronto District School Board. Joseph Muscat is a member of several Professional Artists Associations. He was Chair of Propeller Gallery, Toronto between 2010 and 2015, a founding member of Le Labo d'art and a past board director of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition and BRAVOart. He has sat on a number of arts' juries locally and nationally and is a member of Padejo, a three-artist working collective. Mr. Muscat is represented by David Kaye Gallery, Toronto, Danielle Wohl Fine Arts, Palo Alto, California and Guildworks in Bloomfield Ontario.

Creator Id: 440
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Gender: Male
Mediums: collage, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture

Nina Levitt is an artist who works primarily in the area of photography, installation, and video. Levitt is also an associate professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University. Levitt has shown her work extensively in Canada, and also in the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her work focuses on the experiences of women and frequently uses techniques which involve the reuse and manipulation of existing images, and video. Levitt's work has been extensively reviewed in publications such as: Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. Levitt has received commissions from the Gladstone Hotel, and Women's College Hospital. Levitt also works in through research and received a Research Creation grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. This work was focused on the story of British female spies. This work culminated in two exhibitions at the Koffler Gallery and Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

Creator Id: 368
Social Media Link: Social Media Link
Web Site Link: Web Site Link
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Country: Canada
Gender: Female
Mediums: commission, installation, photography, video