Sky Glabush writes, “When I moved to London, Ontario in 2006, I became interested in the historical importance of its connection to “regionalism.” I began exploring the legacy of artists like Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe, artists that made work out of experience grounded in an immediate concern for the local, but also connected to an understanding of contemporary art and the avant-garde. But the harder I looked the more fleeting and distant their influence seemed to be. Instead of thinking about this nostalgically or sentimentally, I attempted to absorb their ideas, to try and apply the notion of “realism” that Jack Chambers described but with the awareness that the self-assured directness of this approach existed for me only as a faint signal. So the houses I have chosen to paint sit on this liminal edge: in-between the urban and the pastoral; not really modern, but also not classical, or permanent. I am not entirely interested in the everyday, or the banal; I am more interested in the indeterminate space of a rental home: occupied, local, immediate, but transitional and slightly empty.”

Sky Glabush was born in Alert Bay, British Columbia, and grew up alternating between the West Coast and the prairies. He moved to the Netherlands in 2000, where he was artist-in-residence at Haagweg 4 in Leiden for six months. He then established a studio in Amsterdam where he is represented by Suzanne Biederberg. Glabush returned to Canada in 2003, and has recently accepted a faculty position in Studio Art at the University of Western Ontario. Sky Glabush has had numerous exhibitions including shows in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, and Melbourne. He has had solo shows at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, and Arch 2 Gallery (University of Manitoba). His work is in many public collections among them the Canada Council which exhibited it in “Dialogues: the changing face of Contemporary Art” at Rideau Hall. He is also a writer that has published a number of monographs on contemporary artists and frequently contributes to magazines such as Border Crossings and Canadian Art.