Rachel Whiteread (CBE) is an English artist that primarily produces sculptures, typically in the form of casts. She was born in 1963 in Ilford, a town in East London, but raised until age 7 in the Essex countryside.  Her mother was also an artist, while her father was a teacher.  She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art and became interested in casting objects after taking a workshop on casting with sculptor Richard Wilson.  Her works often use industrial materials such as rubber, concrete and plaster. Some of her more popular works include House (1993), which is a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) in Vienna which resembles the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards. Whiteread represented the United Kingdom at the 1997 Venice Biennale and created Monument for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2001. She was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993 (the year she made House).

Embankment by Rachel Whiteread. Turbine Hall, The Tate Modern, Bankside, London. 12 November 2005. Photographer: Fin Fahey. CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=422277

American artist Jessica Stockholder currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois as Chair of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago.  She was born in Seattle, Washington in 1959 and studied painting at the Emily Carr before receiving her MFA from Yale University. She is a sculptor and installation artist that has had exhibitions in her home country of the USA, as well as throughout Europe. The website Art21 calls her work “energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic.”  Her installations often challenge the boundaries of their sites – moving beyond the windows and doors, incorporating the architecture in unique ways by scaling the walls and carpeting the floors.  She has a particular fondness for colour and the use of unusual everyday objects as materials, some examples being bowling balls, laundry baskets and bales of hay.  She cites many artists as being inspirational to her development, from French impressionist/post-impressionist painters to Canadian Indigenous artists.

Born of Landscape Linoleum – 1999 – Middelheimmuseum By Sandra Fauconnier – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59794494

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is a Vancouver based artist of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent who was born on 1957 in Kamloops, Canada. Yuxewelupton’s work consists of indigenous people and history which he incorporates into his contemporary art. His artwork has immense meaning behind it as he paints to contribute to his heritage as well as to let people know about the history of his people including the effects of colonialism. Something admirable about Yuxwelupton is that as a history painter sometimes he might not want to work on certain projects about certain times in history, but someone has to do it and he takes that upon himself.

Edward Hardy Harrison was born in 1926 in Wingate England, Ted Harrison is an artist who contributed to art and education for many years. Ted Harrison learned art and design during his college years, however his studies were interrupted by the second world war. Once his military services ended Harrison resumed with his art studies and received a diploma in design, the following year Harrison completed his B.Ed. Harrison traveled in different parts of the world until he immigrated with his family and settled in Yukon, Canada. Different parts of Canada (Yukon, Vancouver) has inspired much of his work and Harrison went on to put on expos as well. Harrison also won many awards for his contribution to Canadian culture.

Janet Morton is a Canadian artist who is famous for her knitted sculptures, although she started out as a painter. Her artwork has been showcased in galleries internationally. She is most famous for enshrouding her entire house in a knitted cozy. Janet is also known for having installed Greco-Roman style columnar covers for the hydro poles in her hometown of Guelph. These particular pieces are a commentary on the surrounding subdivisions that are increasingly taking over the local farm land, and are generally not made to withstand the test of time, reflecting a short-term way of thinking about housing and neighbourhoods as disposable. Her more recent works incorporate bits and pieces of found objects like bottle caps and other detritus.

Brent Sparrow, Jr. is a contemporary Musqueam carver. He was born in 1970 to his mother, Susan Point, who is a renowned artist in her own right. Sparrow apprenticed with her and Kwakwaka’wakw artist John Livingston. We know his work well from the welcome post we walk past every day on our way to the Scarfe building. This particular post tells the origin story of the Musqueam people and how they got their name. This and some of his other carvings are acts of reconciliation, art works that are building relationships between indigenous and settler communities in the lower mainland. His work incorporates the stories and teachings of the Musqueam people, represented in traditional shapes and design elements.

Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim was born on October 6, 1913 in Germany, yet grew up in Switzerland. She joined the Surrealists and began to create sculptures. Oppenheim’s sculptures embraced feminine domestic object, but with a twist. She would specifically underline how one household item can be used in an entirely different way or by adding other materials that usually do not belong to the item. For instance, her fur-covered cup is one of her famous sculptures. Oppenheim was one of the first female members in the Surrealists group and brought these sculptures to present different forms of an object.

Kurt Schwitters was born on June 20, 1887 in Germany. He studied art and drawing at Dresden Academy from 1909-1915. Schwitters began his artistic journey by collecting garbage and turning it into art masterpieces. He began his ventures after World War I and used his creative building by finding materials around him. With the garbage, Schwitters would directly place the pieces of garbage onto his current works. Through these art pieces, he would create collages that would incorporate his artistic mind and the media’s printed works. He later created journals, advertisement and he founded the Merz journal.

Brian Jungen is a Canadian artist known for his contemporary art, who currently is living and working in the North Okanagan of British Columbia. He creates sculptures out of a variety of materials that are considered everyday. Many of his sculptures take the form of traditional Aboriginal art forms, or resemble standard tools, and components of Aboriginal cultures. By combining everyday, very mainstream, materialistic, and superfluous, he is able to create and highlight the juxtaposition between the materialistic modern culture we currently experience, and its cohabitation with Aboriginal cultures. He has made things such as totems, and masks, out of sporting goods, such as golf balls, and has an installation in the National Gallery of Canada that is a whale created out of plastic lawn chairs.

Works

Hajra Waheed is a Canadian artist from Montreal who works with various medias (from collage, to video, sound and sculpture) to explore issues around covert power, mass surveillance, cultural distortion, other other traumas faced by displaced subjects through mass migration. She uses extensive research and new accounts to prompt and support her work. She expresses her work in a variety of ways. For instance, since 2008 she has been working on an ongoing series called the Anouchian Passport Portrait Series. She created renderings, drawn in pencil and charcoal that mimics the automated movements of a printer, of men and women whose pictures were taken by an Armenia photographer, Antranik Anounchian. She also has done video installations, and other medias throughout her career.

http://hajrawaheed.com/works/