Showing 3 results

Elizabeth Chitty (1953-) is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance, installation, video, sound, photography, and dance. She was born in St. Catharines, Ontario and completed an Honours B.A. in Fine Art, Modern Dance Major at York University in 1975. During her early career in the late 70s and early 80s, she quickly became a central figure in the Toronto and Vancouver performance art and New Dance scenes and was associated with artist-run centres 15 Dance Lab, A Space, and Art Metropole. Works created during this period, such as Mover (1975), Drop (1976), and Lap (1977) expanded the vocabulary of dance to explore force and linear movement, often to the point of emotional risk and violence. Using the movement of digital images, sound, and the body, Chitty addressed themes of information technology, media deconstruction, the grammar and syntax of performance, and feminism's relationship with sexual agency. She also experimented with video, producing single-channel video artworks (Telling Tales [1979]) as well as incorporating the use of both closed circuit and pre-recorded video in her performance works (History, Colour TV & You [1981]). In the late 80s she shifted her focus from staged, interdisciplinary solo performances to the creation of large-scale multimedia spectacles such as Moral/Passion (1985) and landscape-based installations such as Lake (1990). Inspired by her own Buddhist practice, many of her works have explored the relationship between the body and consciousness to question how we perceive the world, our thoughts, and emotions (Nature of the Body [1996]). In 1988, Chitty moved back to the Niagara Peninsula, where she has resided ever since. At this time, she began her long-standing involvement with Indigenous communities in the region and assisted with the development of the local community justice program, Winds of Change Women’s Drum Group. The community-based strategies and walking projects that have appeared in Chitty's artistic works since the 90s (Progress of the Body [1997], Earth's Flesh [2003], Daylighting [2016], Confluence Field Trips [2016], The Grass is Still Green [2017]) are a reflection of her reconciliatory work, as she considers water and its management, concepts of governance and ownership of public space, traditional territory, embodied knowledge, displacement, and historical and contemporary marginalized space and narratives.

In addition to her artistic practice, Chitty has also held roles as an arts administrator, educator, editor, and producer. From 1976-1978, she was the editor for Spill, a magazine published by 15 Dance Lab about the New Dance movement. She was the Chair of Trinity Square Video (1982), Managing Director of the Association of National Non-profit Artist-run Centres (1982-1984), Executive Director of St. Catharines and Area Arts Council (2004-2008), and Executive Director of the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists, Ontario Chapter (2008-2011). From 1991-2007, Chitty taught Creative Process at the School of the Toronto Dance Theatre. She was a video/media curator for Western Front (1980-1981) and went on to found Cultural Desire Projects (1985-1990) which produced major works by Chitty, Randy & Berenicci, Tanya Mars, and Vera Frenkel.

Chitty has performed and exhibited her work widely across Canada and also internationally in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. Her video artworks Demo Model (1978), Telling Tales (1979), Desire Control (1981) and Dogmachine (1981), and T.V.Love (1982) are in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. In 2017, her exhibition The Grass is Still Green was awarded "Exhibit of the Year" at the Ontario Association of Art Galleries' annual awards gala.

Murray Favro (1940- ) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, sculptor, and musician based in London, Ontario. He is known for his multimedia installations and his work with the Nihilist Spasm Band, of which he is a founding member.

Favro was born in Huntsville, Ontario where he lived until moving to London, Ontario in 1957 with his mother. Here he attended the H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School (1958-62), where he studied art and became acquainted with a number of other artists in the area. In 1968 Favro married Judith Bryon, and their son, Mark, was born in 1969. After receiving a Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 he was able to leave a job as a commercial artist at a printing company and begin working on creating and exhibiting his art full time.

Throughout his career Favro has worked with a diverse range of materials and mediums, including paint, sculpture, projections, film, instruments, and machinery, although he is perhaps best known for his projected reconstructions and technical objects, which cross the borders between art and invention. Much of his work reflects a strong interest in perspective, the relationships between art and science, and technology, and is known to challenge traditional categorization. Two major retrospective exhibitions of Favro’s work have been held to date, the first by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1983 and the second by the London Regional Art and Historical Museums and the McIntosh Gallery in 1998.

In addition to his artistic career, Favro is the guitarist for the Nihilist Spasm Band, which he founded alongside John Boyle, John Clement, Greg Curnoe, Bill Exley, Art Pratten, Archie Leitch, and Hugh McIntyre in 1965. Favro has described his work with the band as influential and parallel to his work as an artist, noting the band’s lack of hierarchy and their music’s lack of structure as intentional and significant. The instruments he plays as guitarist for the band are of his own creation, as are a number of the instruments played by other members of the band. They have performed shows across Canada and internationally, including an appearance at the Paris Biennale in the 1970s and at least two Japan tours in 1996 and 1999.

Throughout his career Favro has given artist talks and lectures at institutions across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, and taught classes at the Ontario College of Art in the 1970s. Together with a number of other artists who were active in London in the 1960s and 70s, such as Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart, he was involved with some of the first artist-run galleries in Canada, namely the 2020 Gallery, which existed from 1966-1970 and the Forest City Gallery, founded in 1973.

Favro’s work is held and has been exhibited by many major art institutions and private collections across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Fine Arts Museum. He has been represented variously by the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. Favro received the Gerhson Iskowitz Award in 1997 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2007.

Betty Roodish Goodwin (1923-2008) was a Montreal-based printmaker and installation artist.