• Elza Mayhew

    Artist

    Elza Mayhew (1916–2004) was born in Victoria, BC. She received a BA from UBC (1936) and MFA (1963) from the University of Oregon. Mayhew was known for her abstract sculptures that were typically carved in polystyrene and then cast in aluminum or sometimes bronze. She worked primarily from sketches, rarely from models, and described her work as highly structured and architectural while always relating to the human form. Mayhew produced commissioned works for international events such as Expo 67, Expo 86 and an international trade fair in Tokyo, as well as for public institutions such as the Bank of Canada, the University of Victoria, the Canadian National Capital Commission and the Royal British Columbia Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the National Gallery of Canada, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria. Her sculpture Column of the Sea is located at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown. Mayhew was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, and was an active member of the Limners Society.

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  • Robert Murray

    Artist

    Robert Murray, sculptor, painter, printmaker and art teacher, was born in Vancouver in 1936 and grew up in Saskatoon. He began studying art in Saskatoon, taking courses at the Bedford Road Collegiate High School under Ernest Lindner (1897-1988) and at the Saskatoon Teachers’ College under Wynona Mulcaster (b. 1915). In 1960, after attending the Regina College School of Art (1956-1958) and the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop led by Barnett Newman in 1959, Murray moved to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students’ League under Will Barnet (1911-2012). As an artist, Murray had started out as a painter and a printmaker but shifted his focus to sculpture beginning in 1959, when he accepted a commission to design a sculptural fountain for Saskatoon City Hall. The commission was Murray’s first attempt at designing large-scale sculptural works in metal fabricating plants. He continued in this vein in subsequent years, designing numerous monumental constructions in steel and aluminum, including the red painted steel sculpture entitled Ferus, which he produced at the Treitel-Gratz factory in New York in 1963. The work was installed on Lookout Island in Georgian Bay, ON and was shown at the Washington Square Gallery, New York in 1964 and at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, the following year. It was purchased in 1999 by the National Gallery of Canada, which held a Robert Murray retrospective entitled The Factory as Studio during that year. Along with the National Gallery of Canada, Murray’s work can be found in the collections of the Belkin, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the New Brunswick Museum (Saint John) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

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  • Robert Smithson

  • Christos Dikeakos

    Artist

    Christos Dikeakos was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1946. He moved to Vancouver in 1956, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1970. Working primarily in photography and text, Dikeakos’ work has been included in the exhibitions Topographies (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004), Displaced Histories (Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1995), and Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography (Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2006). Public commissions include The Lookout, a collaboration with architect Noel Best (False Creek, Vancouver). Published art projects include “A Vast and Featureless Expanse: the car-rides and street scans, 1969/71” in Unfinished Business: Photographing Vancouver Streets, 1955 to 1985 (Presentation House Gallery, 2003) and “Glue Pour and the Viscosity of Fluvial Flows as Evidenced in Bottle-Gum Glue Pour Jan. 8. 70 9:30 to 11:30” in Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004).

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  • Genevieve Robertson

    Artist

    Genevieve Robertson (Canadian, b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in environmental studies. Her drawings are often comprised of found organic materials collected on-site, and map a visceral and long-term engagement with specific regions. Through recent research in the Kootenays, the Salish Sea and the Fraser and Columbia rivers, she has engaged with the complexities that emerge when relating to land and water in a time of large-scale industrial exploitation and climate precarity. Her process-based studio work is rooted in inquisitive conversation, long-term place-based exploration and being out on the shoreline. Robertson has shown at venues including at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the Pensacola Museum (Florida), Touchstones Museum (Nelson), Or Gallery (Vancouver), the New Gallery (Calgary) and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University (2016) and a BFA from NSCAD University (2009).  

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  • Teresa Montoya

    Artist

    Teresa Montoya (Diné, b. 1984) is a social scientist and media maker trained in socio-cultural anthropology, critical Indigenous studies and filmmaking. Drawing from Diné oral histories as well as ethnographic and archival practice, Montoya’s research and media production focuses on legacies of environmental contamination and settler colonialism in relation to contemporary issues of tribal jurisdiction and regulatory politics in the Indigenous Southwest. Her photographic and film work has been shown and published internationally, including in the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective and Anthropology Now. In addition to her art practice, she has curatorial and education experience in various institutions, including the Peabody Essex Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from New York University with a filmmaking certificate in Culture and Media. Montoya is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago where she teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

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  • Holly Schmidt

    Artist

    Holly Schmidt (Canadian, b. 1976) is an artist, curator and educator engaging in embodied research, collaboration and informal pedagogy. She creates site-specific public projects that lead to experiments with materials in her studio. As the core of her work, Schmidt explores the multiplicity of human relations with the natural world. During her residency with the Belkin’s Outdoor Art Program, Schmidt has utilized spaces between campus buildings through a process of collective knowledge production. These artistic and ecological interventions foster relationships with plants in a manner that is both distinct from the formal, university landscape design as well as from standard notions of gallery space. Schmidt has been involved in exhibitions, projects and residencies at the Belkin Outdoor Art Program; the Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; AKA Gallery, Saskatoon; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; the Santa Fe Art Institute; Burnaby Art Gallery; and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Vancouver.

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