Over the past two decades, London, Ontario-based artist Sky Glabush has drawn on a wide variety of practices—including painting, drawing and sculpture—to work through pressing questions of identity, history, faith, and the role of the artist. Charting a broad path through varying forms and styles, Glabush’s practice is anchored in concurrent concerns with modernism and autobiography.
For What Is a Self?, Glabush takes over this former estate house with an array of large-scale weavings and mixed-media sculptures. Weaving appeals to Glabush as creative labour that is both meditative and time-consuming; often working with fibres still wet with dye, his subdued colours bleed into one another. Woven swatches also adorn the surfaces of his modular sculptures, which are assembled from materials ranging from found wooden chairs to building materials such as plaster, concrete, plywood, and tile. With each gallery installation conceived as a distinct vignette, What Is a Self? stages an intriguing conversation about interiority, both as we understand it at the scale of the domestic and in terms of the construction of our innermost selves.
Installation shots by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Press:
Toronto Star
