BUYERS, Jane

Jane Buyers was born in Toronto . She received an honours B.A. in Visual Art from York University (1973) and a Master of Education in History and Philosophy from the University of Toronto (1990). She taught art at a number of institutions in Toronto, was a Fine Art instructor at Fanshawe College, London, for seven years and Professor in the Fine Arts department at the University of Waterloo from 1988 to 2010. She became Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Waterloo, in 2014.

Buyers has had over forty solo exhibitions and participated in more than one hundred group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions in pubic galleries include the Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, N.B. (1975); the Art Gallery of Hamilton (1984); the Thunder Bay National Exhibition Centre (1986); Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery, Owen Sound (1991); the Canadian Cultural Centre, Rome (1992); the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (1996); Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa (2005); Koffler Gallery Toronto, (2006) amongst others. Group exhibitions include Monumenta at YYZ, Toronto (1982); O KromaZone at Das Institut Unzeit, Berlin (1982); ChromaLiving, with the ChromaZone Collective in Toronto (1983); Graphic Feminism at A Space, Toronto (1986); Living Impressions, Art Gallery of Hamilton (1989); and Second Skin: Looking at the Garden Again, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph (1996); The Single Tree, Museum London (2000); Great Lakes, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto (2001); Into the Woods, Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo (2006); Pictured: Image and Object in Canadian Sculpture, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2007-8) as well as many others.

A thirty year survey show of Buyers’ work, Gather…Arrange…Maintain, was curated and circulated by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery 2013-2015. The forthcoming catalogue includes an essay by Nancy Campbell and an interview with John Armstrong.

Buyers was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2002. She has been awarded a number of Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants. Her work is in many private and public collections including Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Ernst & Young Collection; Canada Council Art Bank; National Capital Commission, Governor-General’s Residence, Ottawa and Toronto Dominion Bank.

Moving between a variety of media and processes in drawing, sculpture and printmaking, Buyers has worked with wood, steel, plaster, paper, bronze, audio, found objects and porcelain. Trained in the era of Minimalism and Conceptualism, Buyers remains attracted to the physicality of material and to process as agency. Much of her work foregrounds labour in which repetitive, focused effort gradually creates a surface or builds a form.

Buyers’ work evokes human presence through a poetic use of surrogate objects and forms. Her early work is rich with references to domestic proxies such as garments and architecture, while tools and books have reappeared in a number of series over time. Recent drawings employ botanical imagery collected from domestic sources, such as textiles and ceramics to explore the territory between the utilitarian and the decorative, the natural and the artificial, the organic and the fabricated.

Jane Buyers is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Source: Jane Buyers