27 January 2016 - 13 April 2016

The fifth artist to create a commissioned work for SPACE, Mercer Union’s billboard project, is Maggie Groat. Groat works across a variety of media including collage, sculpture, artists’ books, site-specific interventions, and field studies. Forming an ongoing research-based practice, her work explores studies for possible futures, alternative and marginalized ways-of-knowing, salvage practices, and relationships and reconnections to place, from a hybrid Indigenous/Settler perspective. Through reconfiguring and re-contextualizing found and salvaged materials, she assembles images, sculptures, tools and situations that enable moments of envisioning and the potential for action.

This work For Fun for Health Bowl at Academy 1961-2071 (2016) re-inserts an advertisement found in archive images of the building located at 1286 Bloor Street West. Groat proposes a speculative future in which remnants of the past, past functions and ideas of fun and health, are grown over but can be built upon.

Image credits: Maggie Groat, For Fun for Health Bowl at Academy 1961-2071, 2016. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Maggie Groat studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. In fall 2014, she was the Artist Scholar in Residence at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. Select forthcoming and recent exhibitions include; Functionals and wonderings for rest and work, YYZ Artist’s Outlet, Toronto; Showroom, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto (all 2016); Séance Fiction, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Custom Made, Kamloops Gallery, Kamloops, BC; Reading the Line, Western Front, Vancouver; For insufficient interest in present circumstances, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; Impermanent Collections, Temporary Occupations and Other Gatherings, Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catharines, ON, (all 2015). She is represented by Erin Stump Projects and currently lives on the southern shore of Lake Ontario.

SPACE is a series of commissioned works for the billboard space on the side of Mercer Union, a centre for contempoary art. The series began in the spring of 2014, previous contributing artists include: Liz Knox (CA), Giles Round (UK), Walter Scott (CA) and most recently Olivia Plender (UK/SE).