The Arts Council of New Westminster presents:
Garey Shergill
Artist Talk: Sunday, May 5, 2019. 3pm – 4pm
The Gallery at Queen’s Park presents Inter/action: Artist Learning Series. Inter/action is a monthly free public event that facilitates dialogue, practice, and education between the exhibiting artists and members of the community. The programming will be developed and delivered by the artists at The Gallery at Queen’s Park during their exhibition, and will consist of creative events such as artist talks, performance art, theoretical or technical seminars, live drawing/painting, collaborative social practice activities, workshops, or performances. Inter/action: Artist Learning Series encourages the integration of the arts into daily life providing fully hands-on, barrier-free, no-cost art education that promotes intergenerational mentoring opportunities and inclusivity between backgrounds of gender, race, age and ability.
Artist Biography
Born in 1982 in Surrey, BC, Garey Shergill was the youngest, and only boy, of five children. At age 16, he began to explore art as a form of escape to cope with personal insecurities, using it as an emotional outlet and form of personal therapy. Art was the only thing that was truly his own, within the privacy of his sketchbook. Topics of gender and sexuality were present within his work—moving into the abstraction of shapes and figures became a way to disguise the inner conversation he was having within himself. Garey’s passion for art intensified when one of his sisters began studies at Emily Carr; he would watch her work, and soon after began to sit in on her classes.
Fast forward ten years: art was exclusively a highly personal expressive outlet for Shergill. This shifted when he joined a group in the Queensborough area of New Westminster called Artists in the Boro, where his passion and drive were encouraged. He was accepted to Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2012. During this program, Shergill investigated sculpture, woodwork, screen printing and photography. Having tried various media and subjects, he always found his way back to painting. During his schooling, Shergill participated in several group exhibitions in Vancouver and New Westminster, and in 2016 had a solo exhibition at the Gallery at Queen’s Park called “Foreign Gaze: Bollywood Eyes.” The latter ignited his passion to create paintings in series. Graduating with a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr in 2018 was a “full circle” moment for Garey, one that began when he was a 16 year-old sitting in the classroom with his sister.
