The next Artist You Need To Know is Jeannie Thib (1955 – 2013).
Thib was a Canadian artist who worked primarily in the area of sculpture (with immediately recognizable works that were highly ornamental) and printmaking but also produced installations and public art works as well.
From Blouin : “Thib’s rich, multifaceted career long considered questions of memory and transitoriness. In an artist statement for Concordia University’s Canadian Art Database, she explained her interest in “[exploring both] the ephemerality of the body and our desire to leave a mark: to create, organize, and understand. The work posits the body as artifact and archive, and as a region of the imagination — a territory of uncertainty.” Thib’s oeuvre affirms art’s capacity to commemorate, memorialize, and endure.”
More detailed information about many of the works we’ll be sharing in this post can be found at Thib’s archived site here.
She was born in North Bay, Ontario and would earn a BFA from York University in Toronto (1979) : many critics and curators have spoken of how her growing up in Northern Ontario, with the overwhelming presence of nature and the wilderness, would become an inspiration for her artworks.
“In Thib’s hands, the decorative became strong and inhabitable, delicacy became ruminative, precision resulted not in curtailment but in an enhanced expressiveness, and texture became something akin to utterance […] her penchant for precision became monumental while her sense of lightness, delicacy, play, respect for the past and for the nature of materials increasingly became a strong language for the building of a more beautiful and more satisfactory world.” (from here)
A short video / interview with Thib speaking about her art work Ice Follies (2008) can be enjoyed here.
Thib’s career (though cut short by an early death) was significant in terms of exhibitions : notable solo shows were mounted at B and K Projects (Copenhagen, Denmark), Museo de Arte INBA (Ciudad Juarez, Mexico) and Maison Patrimoniale de Barthète (Boussan, France). She participated in group exhibitions internationally, from Australia (Object Gallery, Sydney, Australia) to China (Long Yi Bang Gallery, Beijing). Thib was also awarded multiple public art commissions. These include the following sites : the Royal Bank Centre Dexia (Toronto), the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre (Medicine Hat, Alberta), the City of Toronto Downsview Memorial Parkette and the Toronto Transit Commission.
She earned multiple grants over her career, including from the Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council For the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council.
Thib’s artworks can be found in many significant collections, including The National Gallery of Canada, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Musée dArt Contemporain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, the Art Gallery of Peterborough, the Canada Council Art Bank, MacLaren Art Centre, McIntosh Art Gallery (University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario), McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton, ON) and The Washington DC Convention Center, USA. Her artwork is also in many private collections, such as CIBC and Ernst and Young.
More information about Thib’s accomplishments can be seen here.
Writing about Thib’s exhibition at Rodman Hall Art Centre titled Hyperflat (2013), curator Tila Kellman offered the following : “Thib begins her exploration by contesting the relationship between ornament and viewers. Ornamentation in our daily lives is usually small, adorning our furniture, dishes and clothes. Even most architectural ornament is small enough not to challenge the scale of our bodies (columns being an exception). Thib’s small architectural-like models gleam in wood, Plexiglas, steel, aluminum and marble. They have a jewel-like beauty augmented by their containment in vitrines that seduces viewers to wander visually through them and accept them as miniature worlds.”
Thib succumbed to cancer in 2013 when she was only 58 years old. A fine remembrance of the artist, her artworks and legacy (written by the critic Gary Michael Dualt for Canadian Art Magazine) that also focused upon a memorial exhibition titled Imprint (which took place in 2014) can be read here.
An extensive listing of Thib’s exhibitions, awards and other career highlights can be seen here. An archived web site that offers more of her artworks and more information about her process and ideas can be visited here.