ARTIST PROFILE
Sherie McKay
Sherie
McKay (Gladu) is a native of the Sault area, growing up on St. Joseph
Island. With a natural tendency toward the visual arts, Sherie pursued
her interest in photography at Ryerson in Toronto, and went further
to complete her BFA at White Mountain Academy of the Arts in Elliot
Lake. With over thirty solo and group exhibitions under her belt
since 1998, Sherie has shown across Northern Ontario, as well as
in Toronto. Sherie has been a guest speaker to the Fine art students
at Algoma University, assisted with the body imaging workshop through
her solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Algoma, and has been an
active member in the local arts community since returning to the
Sault in 2003. Sherie currently works out of an industrial studio
space down town, as well as runs private art lessons on occasion.
Sherie feels contemporary artists face many unique demands. We
are expected to reconcile our own creative impulses with the expectations
of the audience, the art world, and society at large. As an individual
Sherie prefers to examine, rather than enforce, typical ideals and
expectations. Moreover, her status as an artist has allowed her
to challenge common North American conceptions and standards associated
with the human body and its social conditioning. More importantly,
she is concerned with how we as individuals internalize these conceptions
and standards such as body image, beauty ideals, and gender rolls.
Her most recent body of work was shown at Loplops Gallery~Lounge.
It is an exploration of personal ideal and illusion. The paintings
are constructed using gauzy material which has been printed using
a painted female body as a stamp. This body print is then laced
as though it was in-itself a corset. A second image is then overlaid
creating the body and wings of a butterfly. The concept revolves
around the idea of transforming oneself into something beautiful,
but utterly different from the original form (a caterpillar to a
butterfly). It is an ideal, but not necessarily attainable. Natural
biology has allowed the butterfly to experience what the human wishes
to create through contraptions, surgery or diet plans. It is the
division between nature and the human manipulation our society has
normalized. Her new projects revolve around human patterns (relating
to clothing) and natural patterns and will unveil themselves at
a group show with her studio-mates, Steve Alexander and Pat Gladu,
later this fall at Loplops.
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