Sean Alward, Generator (Purple Swamp), 2022,coal dust, carbazole dioxazine, benzimidazalone, mineral clay, titanium dioxide, and acrylic resin on linen. Courtesy the artist.
A new show has opened at the SFU Gallery on Burnaby Mountain. You can visit "Sean Alward: Subterranean Rainbow" from now until July 29, 2022.
The gallery is located at Room 3004 in SFU's AQ (Academic Quadrangle) on the south side of the AQ level 3 (across from the Shrum Science Centre).
"Each element of our environs, whether animate or inanimate, contains evidence of its own history and alludes to the conditions that shaped it. Sean Alward’s painting practice is an imaginative, research-driven inquiry that extends from these facts. For several years the artist has mixed his own paints from materials he has gathered on exploratory hikes around Coast Salish territories, including Burnaby Mountain. He animates these materials, which include coal dust, clay, minerals, algae and pollen — each with its own natural and social history — as a means to interrogate his own implication in their transformation into economic “resources,” and to consider his relationship to both human and non-human agents of change. Alward works with matter to think critically about it, so his paintings are both physical objects and conceptual tools with which to shape questions about humankind’s entangled existence within our environment."