Influenced by her day job at an architecture firm, Horowitz has been fascinated by the ways trees are rendered and represented – from hand sketches to CAD stamps – particularly within urban design contexts. Trees of Canada is a spin-off of her research into urban forests.

Trees of Canada is the third of Horowitz’s projects that toy with Canadiana. With Blurry Canada she explored the Great Canadian Landscape through photography. The basis for the language focused work melitzah was the Oxford Canadian Dictionary. With Trees of Canada, she represents the indigenous and naturalized trees in Canada as per Canada’s 2004 National Forest Inventory, looking again to notions of collection, typification, lexicon and mimesis.

With interests in language and communication, data, and rituals of collection, enumeration and analysis, Horowitz centres her practice on collecting and archiving. Her projects are diverse in media, content and tone, and are contextualized within the larger framework of a conceptual art practice. Overall, she is concerned with how visual and information systems define knowledge and cultural roles.

Risa Horowitz has exhibited in Canada at Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), The Owens Art Gallery (Sackville), The Saidye Bronfman Centre (Montreal), The Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon) , and several artist-run-centres, as well as in the UK, Australia, and Brazil. Risa has been awarded grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and was honoured by the receipt of the K.M. Hunter award for excellence in Visual Arts in 2006. Most recently she has shown in fall 2007 at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario and at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Australia in January 2008. In summer 2008, Risa will be an artist in residence at La Cité, the Paris Studio. Further examples of Risa Horowitz’s work can be seen at: www.risahorowitz.com