Gravity and Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art

In his thinking and writing on Canadian art, curator and artist Gil McElroy has repeatedly encountered two elements: gravity and grace. Employing these two notions in a binary fashion―as ends of the aesthetic field―McElroy writes about art in terms that engage everything that surrounds us, exploring the words of such renowned Canadian artists as bpNichol, Dan Steeves, Susan Wood, Peter Dykhuis, Carl Zimmerman, Robin Peck, Gerald Ferguson, Dennis Gill and Christopher Pratt.

A military brat, Gil McElroy was born in Metz, France, and grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His critical writing on art has been published in magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia, and he has worked as an independent curator since the 1980s, organizing exhibitions for galleries in Ontario and the Maritimes. From 1997 to 2000, he was Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, PEI. He won the Christina Sabat Award for Art Criticism in 2001 for his curatorial essay on the visual poetry of bpNichol, “Ground States: The Visual Contexts of bpNichol.” He is also an artist, exhibiting gallery and site-specific installations based on his interests in cosmology. He has published poetry widely in Canadian and American periodicals and anthologies, and a book-length collection of his recent poetry, Dream Pool Essays, was released by Talonbooks in the fall of 2001. He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario.