The next Artist You Need To Know is Sandy Fairbairn.
Fairbairn is a photographer whose artworkhas been shown in galleries throughout Ontario and internationally as well.
For several decades, Fairbairn has been documenting buildings and places around Niagara, in a manner that intersects with social history, urban ecology and the larger narratives of Niagara. HIs photographs offer a history of Niagara, but it is a fractured story, that may be cohesive in formal ways but exposes spaces and sites that often challenge many narratives about these sites.
From here : “Often captured ‘straight on’, with Fairbairn across the street from the ‘subject’, the buildings – whether in use, or in a ‘new’ iteration of being, or abandoned and boarded up – are thoughtful portraits. His eye is unflinching: no fluffy, extraneous ‘contextualization’ here. The dead on framing is almost like a mug shot or the minimalist air of the coroner’s image taken of the dead, to help record, remember and identify ‘reality.’ But in this immediacy is also a sensitivity. I’ve described Fairbairn as a social historian with his lens, but I don’t think he’s comfortable with that term (this doubt makes me think that he deserves that accolade even more). There are thoughtful elements evoking the paintings of John Kasyn here, or even Lawren Harris’ St John’s Ward scenes.”
Fairbairn was born in Windsor, ON, in 1947. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) with honours, and earned a scholarship while there (W. O. Forsyth Scholarship, 1971) and the Emmanuel Hahn Award for sculpture (also 1971).
He is a founding member of Niagara Artists Centre and past president of the same.
The words of the artist :
“The downtown, built environment is in a constant struggle for renewal. Though tenants, graffiti and signage change, all are anchored by the city’s architectural heritage. Mature buildings, like the mature trees in a forest, provide a sense of security and continuity in the presence of this change. Every visit to town presents something new to the camera. I have no interest in these buildings as objects of nostalgia. This is what a Canadian industrial city looks like, affected by late stage capitalism’s neoliberal Globalization and Free Trade agenda.
My work has always included constructed objects in the sculptural tradition as well as photographic images. While the three dimensional pieces soon came to deal with historical themes and references, the photographic work has always been about the present. Most of what interests me creatively, I can now find with and express in the photographic medium. Photography can be a process of collecting and I regard my photographs as a kind of ‘found object’ artwork. I can’t make this stuff up.”
Fairbairn has been awarded multiple grants from both the Ontario Arts Council (1974-1984 and 2013) and the Canada Council (1974, 1975, 1977). He has exhibited his work at AIH Studios (Welland, ON), Rodman Hall Art Centre (St. Catharines, ON), Niagara Artists Centre (St. Catharines, ON), CRAM Gallery (St. Catharines, ON), Gallery 44 (Toronto, ON), A Space (Toronto) and many other spaces.
A major exhibition of his work in 2020 titled Welland: Times Present TImes Past was praised by a number of people in the cultural community in that city as ‘the most significant art show of the last decade.’
“There is a fracture in Fairbairn’s images, between the present and the past, what [we] walk by – or just walked by yesterday, and will again tomorrow – and the ideas encapsulated by these buildings, in that manner that architecture holds ideas as much as people.” (from here)
Much more about Fairbairn’s art and ideas can be seen here and here.