Argus Panoptes / Polyphemus (Cyclops)

Andy Fabo

Andy Fabo is an artist, critic, curator and activist living in Toronto. Born and raised in Calgary, he attended the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art before he moved to Toronto in 1975. He has also lived in Paris, France (1972-73) and New York (1984-86) where he held the residency of the Canada Council studio at P.S.1. He first exhibited at Toronto's A Space in 1978 and has since shown extensively locally, nationally and internationally. He has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Andy Fabo first became known as a painter, in association with ChromaZone, the collective that spearheaded Toronto's figurative painting movement of the early eighties. Since the mid-eighties, however, he has made a shift in media and is now working primarily in drawing, installation, video and digital imaging. He considers drawing and collage to be the central pillars of his art practice. His work has always dealt with personal identity, often in a social context, focusing on his position as a gay man in this society. Andy Fabo, in collaboration with his life partner of fifteen years, Michael Balser, has recently exhibited two digital data projection installations: Blue Convergence (2000, Eyelevel, Halifax, Nova Scotia) and The Motion of Light in Water (2001, SWG Gallery, Cornerbrook, Newfoundland). His last solo exhibition was Time Machine, a series of 24 silkscreen and acrylic paintings (the film for the screens was made from digital files) that reflected the collapsing of personal memory and media nostalgia in our media-saturated age.