TRICIA SELLMER

Painting, Works on Paper, Curator

City: Kamloops, British Columbia

Website: http://www.triciasellmer.com

Artist Statement: Tricia Sellmer works primarily within the parameters of painting and drawing. Her work is about ideas and narratives, from the poetic to the political. For more than twenty-five years, she has concentrated on making the invisible visible. Her interests are four-pronged. The first probes the personal and veiled subtleties of the garden and the shifting patterns of the landscape. The second finds the extraordinary in the ordinary and focuses largely on the domestic lives of women and in particular those whose lives have often been forgotten within the dialogue of history or silenced through circumstances beyond their control. The third searches for truths to write / right a wrong. The fourth connects the dots and blurs the boundaries between genres, often in collaboration with other artists who work in a different medium. She writes and delivers lectures that speak to notions of popular culture as a medium to channel art history.

Biography: Tricia Sellmer is a multi-layered, multi-medium, Canadian visual artist, based in Kamloops, British Columbia, working primarily in the genre of painting and drawing. She spent her childhood in the Smilkameen Valley, holds four degrees from three universities, is a mother to three grown children, a grandmother to three grandchildren and a widow. As an independent working artist, she also writes, lectures and curates projects and exhibitions. Some of the highlights of her career include receiving her MFA in 2009 from the Transart Institute based in Berlin / New York, participating in artist residencies in New York and Italy, delivering a lecture on the top of a Tuscan hillside to SFU graduate students, working with the Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck, opening Chazou, a back alley studio that eventually morphed into a Hybrid gallery in 2012 and participating in exhibitions in Berlin and New York. Her work is held in collections across North America, in Europe and more recently South Africa and Mexico.