Janice Gurney, visual artist
Janice Gurney, while participating in the dig at the archaelogical site of Monte Testaccio, Rome, Italy. 2013
ECH Board Member Janice Gurney with ECH co-founder Jamelie Hassan at Antonio Gramsci’s grave, Cimitero Acattolico of Rome. 2010. Photo Credit: Ron Benner
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Gurney, Janice: Janice is a Canadian contemporary artist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1986, Janice Gurney joined the advisory board of the Embassy Cultural House. Her strong ties to London involved in 1987, participation in the YYZ "World Tour" exhibition with 15 artists including artist/partner Andy Patton. In 1988, Janice and Andy, through an Ontario Arts Council artist in residence grant, awarded to the ECH, spent one month in London and had a solo exhibit in the spring of 1989. During this period Andy and Janice met with many London artists, writers and curators, including Greg Curnoe, David Merritt and curator Judith Rodger.
She graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1973 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours degree and later received a Master of Visual Studies degree from University of Toronto in 2007 with a collaborative degree in Book History and Print Culture. She went on to get a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University in 2012. Gurney's work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada. Notable collections which have featured her art include: the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Museum London. In her work, Gurney explores abstract concepts of human connection, meditation, and isolation using post-modernist art, collage, and visual meditation as methods of inspiration. Please visit her Wikipedia page for more information. Moveable Wounds, Art Metropole Toronto,Canada, 1984
“Gurney’s book is a compilation of World War 1 documentary photographs juxtaposed with reproduced pages from her partner and artist Andy Patton grandfather’s WW1 dispatch journal, (he was a soldier at the time). The photographs of gruesome battle have been amended by the artist to reveal their structural composition. In addition, the bandages of the victims have been repaired with the use of silkscreen overlays.” News from the artist:
"I am a member of the collective Art + Research initiatives Toronto (A+RiT) which was formed to initiate and develop diverse projects in the visual arts. The other members are art historian/curators Mark A. Cheetham, Julian Jason Haladyn, and Cristina S. Martinez and artists Yam Lau, and Andy Patton, The first major project undertaken by the collective is a book on Canadian appropriation art, with a focus on Toronto artists. Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art, 1977-1990 brings together in one publication a series of commissioned essays and interviews with artists working with appropriated images in the late 70s and the 80s. The book includes extensive documentation of key works that define a distinctively Canadian form of appropriation art. It is especially important that we remember and value our history. This book is a document of the time period and works by the Canadian artists that shaped those histories. Community of Images is co-edited by Julian Jason Haladyn and Janice Gurney and will be published by YYZ BOOKS with support from the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts. As the only book available in which so many works of Canadian appropriation art are gathered together in one place, it is designed to be a research and teaching resource for both professors and students at Canadian educational institutions." |
Images from Janice Gurney's work exhibited at the Embassy Cultural House
Anticipatory Mourning, 1983 was in the group show International Women's Coalition.
Collection of Museum London
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Interview, 1989 was in Janice Gurney's solo show called Interview at the Embassy in 1989.
Collection of The Art Museum, University of Toronto
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