CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Canadian Art
Art made in Canada since the 1970s, from Vancouver photo-conceptualism and Toronto collectives to Indigenous and Inuit contemporary practice.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Canadian Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In the late 1970s a group of Vancouver artists changed how photography could work as art. Jeff Wall staged scenes with the complexity of history paintings and showed them as large backlit transparencies, beginning with The Destroyed Room (1978); Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Rodney Graham and later Stan Douglas explored related questions. In Toronto the trio General Idea spent 25 years parodying media, glamour and the cult of the artist, and in 1987 reworked Robert Indiana's LOVE logo to spell AIDS.
Indigenous artists have reshaped the field. Brian Jungen, of Dane-zaa and Swiss descent, cut up Nike trainers to make forms resembling Northwest Coast masks. Kent Monkman, of Cree ancestry, paints his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle into revised versions of colonial history paintings. Annie Pootoogook drew everyday life in Kinngait, Nunavut, in coloured pencil and ink. Marcel Dzama, from Winnipeg, fills drawings with odd, folkloric characters.