Simon

Simon Frank was born in 1968 in Glasgow, Scotland and grew up in Dundas, ON. Since completing his Honours BA in English at the University of Guelph in 1991, he has lived and worked in Hamilton. For the past twenty-three years, Frank has participated in solo and group exhibitions across Ontario, as well as exhibiting in special projects in Saskatoon, Italy and South Korea. He has received numerous grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Simon Frank’s contemporary landscape-based work utilizes a diversity of media and approaches, and draws from a broad range of artistic and cultural traditions that link us to the natural world. Frank’s new Log-Hammer Landscape paintings continue his ongoing examination of the historical Canadian Landscape tradition. Using a Log-marking hammer - a tool usually used by the forestry industry - to paint and hammer treed landscapes onto reclaimed plywood, this new body of work evokes a strong sense of Frank’s contemporary take on the concept of ‘truth to materials’. The paintings explore the idea that the plywood itself is a kind of displaced landscape, one transformed almost beyond recognition by the industrial resource extraction and manufacturing processes that produce the raw materials used to build our urban worlds.