Janice Gurney (born 1949) is a Canadian contemporary artist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She graduated University of Manitoba in 1973 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours degree and later received a Master of Visual Studies degree from University of Toronto in 2007 with a collaborative degree in Book History and Print Culture. She went on to get a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University in 2012.
Gurney's work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada. Notable collections which have featured her art include: the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Museum London. In her work, Gurney explores abstract concepts of human connection, meditation, and isolation using post-modernist art, collage, and visual meditation as methods of inspiration.
Career and life
Janice Gurney was born 1949, in Winnipeg Manitoba. She pursued visual arts throughout her post-secondary and graduate studies, attending University of Manitoba for a Fine Arts Degree, University of Toronto for a Master's degree in Visual Studies, and University of Western Ontario for a PhD in Art and Visual Culture.
She began exhibiting her work in 1981, with a solo exhibition called The Battle of the Somme, which was shown at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax and YYZ in Toronto. Her works have been exhibited in galleries across Canada including: the University of Toronto Art Centre, the Thielsen Gallery, The Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Museum London, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Working for almost forty years across the country, she has become a well-established Canadian artist.
Between 2007 and 2012 she worked in the faculty of Fine Art at the University of Western Ontario, and has since celebrated the department of Visual Arts’ 50th anniversary at Western. In particular, her experience pursuing a PhD at Western University pushed her towards the complex nature of her art which she has developed over the years.
In 2015, she orchestrated a panel discussion on appropriation in Canadian and American art, titled “In and Out of History: Appropriation in Canadian and American Art,” for the Toronto conference “This is Paradise: Art and Artists in Toronto.”
Outside of the exhibition space, Gurney has multiple publications written about her work.
Janice Gurney: All The Spaces (McIntosh Gallery, 2016) which was edited by Julian Jason Haladyn, includes ideas surrounding Gurney's work on the Marcus Aurelius meditation, a collection of photographs which represents these meditations visually.
Janice Gurney: Sum Over Histories includes writings by Shirley Madill, Suzanne Gilles, Gordon Lebredt, Richard Rhodes, and Barbara Fischer. Janice Gurney: Sum Over Histories, analyzes some of Gurney's best and most renowned works, discussing the intentions around her work, the themes and contexts, and explores some of her other career highlights.
Janice Gurney has created an authentic brand throughout her artistic career, and these selections only name a few of her celebrated accessible works.
Postmodernism and style
As a contemporary artist, Gurney's connection to postmodernism is evident through the mediums and forms she uses in her work. Postmodernism is described as a rejection of ideas and concepts associated with modernism. Artistic techniques that are associated with postmodernist art in particular include: collage, appropriation, performance art, reinvention/recycling of past styles or work in a contemporary context, simplification, bricolage, and the mixing of high art and low art. Many of these themes can be seen in Gurney's work as it is typically political in nature and does not follow a strict binary of thought.
One aspect of postmodernism which is directly related to Gurney's work, is the presence of multiple elements. Collage art is considered the practice of assembling many individual elements (often consisting of different media) to create one new complete image. Gurney's artistic style mimics collage due to the elemental aspects of her work. While she doesn't always overlap images, Gurney often mixes mediums and plays with the boundaries of artistic abstraction to create works that resemble collage. Gurney also often arranges her pieces side by side to assume one overall meaning – a technique that is reminiscent of collage art, though more contemporary in form.
Not only does Gurney interpret collage differently in her works, but her style (while consistent in nature) is fluent from one work to another. Gurney's work follows a surrealist style, and her overall aesthetic varies from piece to piece depending on her overall themes and intentions.