ROBERT WATERS

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Curriculum vitae


Statement



My practice is a study of our ongoing evolution in post-industrial society, exploring social and epistemological transformations that enlighten processes of human domestication and constraint. My work explores biological limitations and our desire as humans to transcend them, concentrating on perceived divisions of body and mind, and concepts of control and freedom. My projects incorporate a range of materials and methodologies that demonstrate our conflicted yet inevitable connection with nature, while further examining the themes of health, technology, violence, masculinity and mortality.

As my investigation focuses on the physical human body in relation to thought and action, my projects in turn emphasize a connection of formal and conceptual relationships. My artworks generally incorporate common, ephemeral materials that specifically reference their visual content or thematic context. In addition to using materials with known connotations, the alteration of appropriated objects and images is a common aspect of my methodology.

Recently I have been working with specific demographic groups to create social art projects that explore personal experience and ontogenetic development, where personal growth and transformation are used to demonstrate individual difference while promoting tolerance and social equality. In presenting the human body and art as sources of political action I intend to provoke a questioning of self-knowledge and social control, with the aim of finding and demonstrating possibilities for emancipation and freedom.




Biography



Robert Waters was born in 1974 in London, Canada, and grew up in the small town of Parkhill in rural Southwestern Ontario. He attended Sir Frederick Banting High School in London, where he studied art under the expert tutelage of Mary Redekop. In 1993 he was accepted on scholarship to York University in Toronto to study Visual Arts. While at York, he was the curator of Winters Gallery, a member of the men's varsity volleyball team, and he participated on an exchange program to Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. He graduated with honours in 1998.

In 2005 Robert held his first solo exhibition, “Man”, at Toronto's pm Gallery, followed by an exhibition at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. The following year Robert exhibited with Satchel Gallery in Toronto, and at MOT in London, UK.

In 2007 Robert moved from Toronto to Mexico City to focus on his art practice. Later that year he held his second solo exhibition, “Loincloth", at pm Gallery, and participated in exhibitions at Kunsthallen Brænderigården in Denmark, and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. In 2008, he exhibited in “Agitar Antes de Usar (Shake Before Using)”, an exhibition of international artists working in site-specific installation, at Artium, a museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.

In 2009, Robert held his third solo exhibition, “Shooter”, at pm Gallery in Toronto, and participated in the group exhibition “Dos Maletas: Nada que Declarar” at Cali Contemporaneo in Colombia. In the same year he received a project grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for his first solo museum exhibition, “Taparrabo”, at Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City. This exhibition garnered serious critical attention, most notably a review in Art in America. His final project for the exhibition was a Conceptual Art Workshop for the Blind, which also acquired significant attention, and is currently being developed for implementation through international museums and organizations for the blind.

In 2010 Robert presented his first solo exhibition in Asia at Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, followed by inclusion in the ArtGigTokyo exhibition titled "Dirty! Dirty! Sex! Sex!".

In 2011 he presented his project "uncover RECOVER" at Artium, a museum in the Basque region of Spain. For this project he grew medicinal plants from the soil of a recently exhumed mass graves from the Spanish Civil War. At the end of the exhibition, the plants were adopted by the Spanish public. In the autumn of the same year, Robert began the Masters of Fine Art (Investigation as Creation) program at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

In Spring 2012, Robert is collaborating with Renee Jackson and Suzanne McCullagh in the philosophy conference "Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Guattari and the Arts" hosted by the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy and King's University College. In conjunction with the conference they will also be creating a mixed-media installation for an exhibition of the same name at McIntosh Gallery at the University of Western Ontario.

All images and text © Copyright Robert Waters 2008 | Site by Jason Bomers Design