Description
In his thinking and writing on Canadian art, curator and artist Gil McElroy has repeatedly encountered two elements: gravity and grace. Employing these two notions in a binary fashionas ends of the aesthetic fieldMcElroy writes about art in terms that engage everything that surrounds us, exploring the words of such renowned Canadian artists as bpNichol, Dan Steeves, Susan Wood, Peter Dykhuis, Carl Zimmerman, Robin Peck, Gerald Ferguson, Dennis Gill and Christopher Pratt.
About the author
Born in Metz, France, poet Gil McElroy grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English Literature at Queen’s University in Ontario. His poems and other works have been published in countless periodicals throughout North America since the late 1970s; issued in a number of self-published chapbooks, broadsheets, and one-of-a-kind book works; and anthologized in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993–2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2003), and Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1999). He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.
McElroy has also been an independent curator and freelance art critic for 20 years, organizing exhibitions for public art galleries and museums in Canada and writing art criticism for magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia. A selection of his catalogue essays and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and in the anthology CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002). His show ST. ART: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol pays tribute to one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Originally mounted at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum in Charlottetown, P.E.I. in May through October, 2000, it later moved to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before touring the country throughout 2001. McElroy’s curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition also won the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts.
Editorial Reviews
“McElroy’s incisive writing on Canadian and, especially Atlantic Canadian, visual art reminds one and all of the terrifying necessity for judicious, illuminating and non-esoteric art criticism.” George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Sunday Herald
Other titles by
Long Division
Cold Comfort
Growing Up Cold War
Sympathetic Hunting Magic
Niall Donaghy, Shelly Rahme
Ordinary Time
Fear & Faith
Recent Sculpture by Shayne Dark and Dennis Gill
Razzle Dazzle
The Uses of Abstraction = Les usages de l'abstraction
Last Scattering Surfaces
Hide in Plain Sight
Peter Dykhuis and Adrian Göllner
NonZero Definitions
Pianoworks
Imagining the R.S. Williams Piano Factory: Murray Favro, alexander Graham, Ryan Legassicke, Carl Zimmerman