Notice Board

Patrick Mahon is an artist, curator and teacher/academic; he has been a faculty member in Visual Arts at Western University, London, ON, since 1995. He was Chair of the Department from 2000 to 2010. His work includes print-based projects that engage with historical and contemporary aspects of print culture, and involves responding to gallery and museum collections as well as establishing community-based art initiatives. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely including, in Canada, at Museum London, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, and internationally at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China, in 2005, and in Barthète (Toulouse), France in 2011. The SSHRC-funded project, Art and Cold Cash, which involved Mahon and other artists from southern Canada and Baker Lake, , Barrie; Platform, Winnipeg: Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina), and a book was published by YYZ in 2010. Patrick’s collaborative SSHRC project, Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds, on the theme of water, began in 2010 and included a residency in Niagara Falls and at the Banff Centre. A related group exhibition, The Source: Rethinking Water through Contemporary Art, opened at Rodman Hall in May 2014. As an individual artist, Patrick Nunavut, was produced and exhibited between 2004 and 2010 (MOCCA, Toronto; McLaren Arts Centre Mahon was in residence for three months at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2007, the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium), and at La Maison Patrimoniale Barthète in France, both in 2011. Recent exhibitions include McMaster Museum of Art (2013); Robert Langen Gallery, Wilfred Laurier University (2013); Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg (2014). A catalogue entitled Water Structures, with an interview by Robert Enright, and essays by Anne Brydon and Ihor Holubizky was released in 2014. Patrick lives in London, Ontario, and is represented by Katzman Contemporary, Toronto.

His lecture will provide a brief overview of my practice, which is print and installation-based, and will concentrate most substantially on his recent projects regarding water and culture. Focusing on his printed sculptural works that have recently been shown in both solo and group exhibitions, my talk will address the role of the artist with regard to contemporary social and environmental realities, and the question as to how aesthetic practices can become meaningful amidst the challenges of the present.  

www.patrickmahon.ca