Greg Snider at Deluge Contemporary Art

"Model-making and drawing have been critical to my practice since the beginning. Formal commission proposals for sculptural projects normally include scale models to afford a realistic sense of the potential work, and over the years I have accumulated a number of these from unsuccessful initiatives. For some time my art practice has focused on possible large-scale public projects, concentrating on the socially productive potential of reconfigured objects designed for specific locations. The capacity of these speculative projects to redirect attention and initiate reflective commentary on imperatives of critical moment within the public sphere seems enormously useful and necessary at this time. As my interest in the role of public art and its actual function has sharpened, model-making has become the conceptual tool of choice for working through, and physically preparing these ideas as scaled-down experimental prototypes. They are perfectly realisable but personally unaffordable full-scale projects, using actual objects in reconsidered contexts. Often inspired by issues of urgent global concern for which commission possibilities do not yet exist, they can be heuristic, didactic, polemical, rhetorical, tendentious or provocative, and always directed toward public discourse and dialogue."

Greg Snider is a sculptor and installation artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. His practice is considered a form of critical realism, primarily directed toward problems of representing labour and work in the public sphere; a recent public art commission for the City of Vancouver (Project for a Public Works Yard, 2004), produced in collaboration with city workers and contractors developing the new National Street Works Yard in Strathcona, is an example. Through his interest in the working body in space and its relation to physical objects, he has had opportunities to produce stage design and objects for performance in interdisciplinary contexts with theatre, dance and music.

 January 27 to February 25, 2012
Opening Friday, January 27, 7pm

636 Yates St