John McEwen

John McEwen was born in Toronto in 1945. He currently lives and works in Hillsdale, Ontario. Co-founder and former director of A Space, John McEwen was honoured in 2007 with a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge, Alberta. He is recognised both internationally and across Canada for his many site-specific installations and public commissions. In 2019 he was a recipient of the Order of Canada.

McEwen is best known for his inventive approach to ‘sculpting’ animals as vehicles of the imagination.

Whether flame cut from a massive steel slab or composed by a skin of steel stars, these sculpted

animals, quite often dogs or wolves, outline the critical ways we experience and think about animals.

Of the two main approaches by animal, the solid steel life size silhouette indicates the divide between us and them – but as we move & with a change in perspective – the ‘animal’ quickens and works within our imagination. However when language threatens to conscript the ‘free’ animal and to put that animal to use McEwen often introduces other vehicles such as the canoe, boat or airplane to produce a mitigating effect. These vehicles and their given perspectives, might then either replace or operate along side the animal.

In his second, more recent approach, animals made with a skin of small laser cut stars demonstrate a more interactive cosmos, one with a more free range and less guarded dynamic. Within these three dimensional bodies, difference becomes reminder that all life exists – like folds in a garment, alike through embodiment but different through life style.