Our next Artist You Need To Know is Janny Fraser.
Fraser produces evocative mixed-media installations, working with mediums such as clay, fiber and found objects. Her art primarily focuses on “creating hybrid mixed media objects that deal with time as the vehicle of change and transformation, reflecting environmental issues in both the urban man-made environment and the natural landscape.”
Fraser is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art (now OCADU) with a focus on drawing, painting and etching. Her art is often informed by the accelerated process of urbanization and globalization world-wide, creating sculptural works that often ‘grow’ into larger installations that fill a gallery space but also have intimate, delicate details that attract the viewer. She has been an active member of one of the first artist-run centres in Canada, the Niagara Artists Centre, and is a founding member of the Jordan Art Gallery, which specializes in exhibiting contemporary work from the Niagara Peninsula since 2000.
“Landscape Transformations, Gathered Environments or Sense of Place are all titles [of works by Fraser] but also serve accurately and evocatively as descriptive responses. Organic elements are often incorporated into her works, and elements of the everyday (chairs, boxes, books) take on a new life and different meaning through how Fraser augments and enhances their appearance and thus changes their being and how they’re ‘read’ as works of art.” (from here)
Fraser’s artwork is “sometimes ‘industrial’, sometimes delicate in their fabricated assemblages: her artworks (to quote the artist) “deal with time as the vehicle of change and transformation visible in landscape and urban overviews. I use photography and photo-collage as part of these mixed media and porcelain mosaic constructions, contrasting human and natural habitats. Convex and concave mirrors, lenses and magnifying glasses draw the viewer into the pieces.”” (from here)
Significant exhibitions of her work include Sense of Place at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery; Fragmentation at the Bainton gallery, Blyth, ON; Parallel Metaphors at the Cambridge Art Gallery and Rodman Hall Arts Centre; Gathered Environments which was at the Erindale and Scarborough College galleries at the University of Toronto; Landscape Transformations at Brock University; The Mosaic Eye at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery: Edge of Change at Holcim Gallery, Milton, ON: and Placement-Displacement at the Cambridge Centre for the Arts. Fraser was the recipient of the Regan Peacock Fung Memorial Award (from Niagara Artists Centre) in 2016, and she has been included in exhibitions at the John B. Aird Gallery (Toronto, ON) and the Riverbrink Art Museum (Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON).
More of Janny Fraser’s artwork can be enjoyed here and here (including some installation shots of past exhibitions that give a different sense of her artwork, as environments she creates and the viewer can move around within). Fraser has numerous works currently on display at the Jordan Art Gallery (if you follow them on social media, you’ll see many new and detailed works from the artist), but also has had artworks on view on a regular basis with Davis Fine Art (in Stratford, ON) and Bartlett Gallery (Alton Mills, ON).