Congratulations to recent alumni Meryl McMaster for her show, opening today, at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico!

Photo by Ian Clark

Meryl McMaster: Wanderings
Guest Curator: Jon Lockyer
August 21th to December 31st

Meryl McMaster’s work demonstrates a continually evolving exploration of the artist’s own relationship to cultural and familial heritage within the larger framework of historical and contemporary Indigenous identities. As a person with both Indigenous and European familial lineages, McMaster treats identity subjectively, as something that is never complete, always in process, but invariably shaped by both internal and external factors and actions. Wandering, a new body of photo-based work, represents a new progression in the photo-based practice of Meryl McMaster. While previous bodies of work have established the artist’s occupation of two contrasting, but interrelated worlds, the work in Wandering takes aim at the personal journey McMaster has undertaken within these worlds.

About the artist:
Meryl McMaster is an Ontario-based artist and a BFA graduate from OCAD University, Toronto. She is the recipient of the Charles Pachter Prize, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, the Canon Canada Prize and the OCAD Medal. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout Canada and the United States and has been acquired by various public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Eiteljorg Museum and the Donovan Collection.

About the curator:
Jon Lockyer is a curator, educator, and writer from Toronto, Ontario. Lockyer’s interest as a curator focuses on issues of social and political engagement, and that challenges the aesthetic and pedagogical boundaries of contemporary art. More specifically, Lockyer is interested in Indigenous art and curatorial practices that have originated in North America since the early 1960s. Lockyer received his BA from Trent University in Canadian Studies, and recently completed an MFA at OCAD University in Criticism and Curatorial Practice. He was an intern at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), and previously worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, ON) and C Magazine. Lockyer currently lives in Peterborough, Ontario where he is the Director of Artspace.