Project for an Art Fair (1987 – Warhol/Beuys), 2011, mixed media, 107 x 61 x 61 cm

Project for a Holocaust Memorial, 2011, mixed media, 107 x 61 x 61 cm

Project for the Tar Sands (Recirculating Crude Oil Fountain for Fort McMurray), 2012, mixed media, 107 x 61 x 61 cm

Project for False Creek (Vancouver Special Saw Mill), 2012, mixed media, 107 x 61 x 61 cm

Project for a Public Fountain (Rock Fountain), 2012, mixed media, 152 x 61 x 61 cm

Project for a New Development (Cement Truck – Ghost Version), 2011, mixed media, 142 x 61 x 61 cm

Project for an Aircraft, 2011, mixed media, 152 x 122 x 122 cm

Models for the Public Sphere: Tar Sands, Aircraft, Holocaust...

Greg Snider

January 27 to February 25, 2012

“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 re-direct 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 realizable 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.

From 1981–2009 he taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, in visual art studios, critical theory seminars, technical theatre, and social art history. He has written criticism and served as Curator of Contemporary Art for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and for Open Space Gallery, in Victoria, BC.

In 2002 he independently produced and curated GLYPTOMANIA, a large-scale indoor exhibition of 14 contemporary BC sculptors. He has been the recipient of numerous grants, including Canada Council Senior Arts Grants, and is represented in a number of public and private collections in Canada, including the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the National Gallery of Canada.