Studio visit with:

Carrie Walker and Sonja Hebert

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Sonja Hebert is a graduate from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2002) and received a BC Arts Council Scholarship during her studies. She was a ceramic apprentice with Jean Cartier in Montréal and was a resident artist with Mawa (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art). Her work has been exhibited at the Third Avenue Gallery, Evergreen Cultural Centre, and the Galerie du Centre franco-manitobain. Her large scale drawings have been featured in Via TVA, a national television series profiling Canadian artists. Hebert has been interviewed on Radio-Canada and is affiliated with francophone provincial and federal arts organizations. She is one of the participating artists in an online group show and catalogue entitled Allegories of the Genome Project sponsored by Genome BC.

She draws, paints, and creates installations. Her work emphasizes the relationship between social values and the environment in which we live. Her themes include survival, adaptability, death, renewal and psychic integrity. Her choices of media for installation are combinations of altered domestic objects with traditional and unconventional sculptural materials. Both raw and readymade are chosen for their cultural symbolic or functional associations. Sonja’s 2-D works combine paint, charcoal, graphite, and oil sticks creating a layered effect. The multi layers convey the subjects’ subtle complexities and interconnections. Sonja currently resides and creates in Vancouver, BC.

Carrie Walker is a visual artist based in Vancouver, B.C. She works primarily with images of animals using them as a metaphor for human emotions meanwhile through titling her work from carefully selected fragments of text she both critiques the ways in which humans portray animals and offers a springboard for further interpretation. All this has resulted in her spending an inordinate amount of time flipping through animal encyclopedias and field guides. She has also been painting a series of portraits of women who share her name. These paintings are based on photos culled from the internet. Like her animal drawings these works are titled with snippets of text taken out of context from the page the photo was taken leaving the viewer with the minutest bit of information from which to form a sense of the person portrayed. More recently she has been drawing animals into found landscape drawings creating unusual scenes with the animals being generally disproportionate or out of context to the original scene. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited in New York, London, Los Angeles and Vancouver.