Taking an interdisciplinary approach, John Monteith works across photography, video, sculpture, drawing, painting, textiles, performance, and curatorial initiatives. His aesthetic derives from processes that include layering, distorting, cropping, rearranging, flattening, and reducing, while conceptually he contemplates the ways the evolving urban fabric shapes our collective imagination.
Read MoreMonteith was born in Newmarket, Ontario, in 1973. He studied at The Ontario College of Art and Design University before receiving an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, in 2008. He has exhibited at London's Tate Modern, the 7th Beijing International Art Biennale, Berlin's Schinkel Pavillon, the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, New York's DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, and Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City.
He has held residencies at CAT Cologne (2011); Kunsthalle Roveredo (2014); and I: project space, Beijing (2018). He currently lives and works in Toronto, where he is a member of the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
About the Artist
John Monteith's installation Resonances is comprised of 21 wax-and-pigment pencil drawings and three multi-layered composite photographs. These works operate both as abstractions—formal, geometrical studies in exquisitely chosen colours—and explorations of urban sites of social exchange, including skyscrapers and skylines, parks and paths, highways and byways. The drawings and photographs are informed by Andreas Huyssen's notion of the 'urban palimpsest', which describes how cities retain layers of history and memory as neighbourhoods change, redevelop, and are rebuilt.
Ocula | 2019
