Catherine Farish
years with Cynthia-Reeves: 22
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
HIGHLIGHTS
Grand Prize, Printmaking, Quebec Canada
International Arts Festival, Residency, Asilah, Morocco
Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, Inductee
Catherine Farish is constantly inquiring into different ways of looking. Whether she is combing scrapyards for metal parts and computer discards to use as printing objects, re-purposing player piano rolls as surfaces on which she can situate abstract marks, language fragments, or figures, or re-writing a romance on envelopes from the 1940s, she is perennially on the lookout for things that will allow her to complicate both surfaces and the manner in which they are perceived. Hers is a restless sort of gathering. –Robert Enright, art critic, and curator
In the works presented here, Farish has used, respectively, a metal artifact from the past century, and player piano rolls as both content and surface. All the images are mixed media, employing the process of collagraph printmaking. On the repurposed player piano rolls the artist has added abstract marks, language fragments, and collaged papers, which allow her to complicate both the surfaces and how those surfaces are perceived. The encoding techniques for musical language become an expressive vocabulary and vehicle for Farish’s ongoing interest in music, rhythm and the repetition of motif.
Farish received a diploma from the Montreal Museum School of Fine Arts and her BFA from Concordia University. She went on to study with a master printer in the French tradition of printmaking. Farish has shown extensively in Europe, Canada, the United States, Mexico and Asia with over forty solo exhibitions and her work can be seen in many collections. She is the recipient of the Grand Prize for Printmaking in Quebec and the Acquisition Award from the City of Montreal. Other awards include the Grand Prize for Printmaking in Québec, the Material Award in the Boston Printmakers Exhibition and several grants, including a residency at the International Art Festival in Asilah Morocco. In 2008 she was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts. The artist lives and works in Montreal, Canada.