Chris Myhr

salients (2022-23)

Mid-career retrospective at the McMaster Museum of Art. The exhibition brings together photographs, audio, and found-object sculptures from a cross-section of work developed between 2016 and 2022. The installation explores themes related to water, Earth systems, complex interconnectivity, and materiality.

The notion of “salience” describes what is most prominent – the point of critical mass, or that which emerges from the background, gesturing outwards for our attention. Depicting both human-made artifacts and ecological materials recovered from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, the banks of the Athabasca River (northern Alberta), and the waters of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the photographs explore the salient, or the material legacy of human endeavour and action, shaped and marked by water over long passages of time.

Presented together, the work ruminates on the permanence of things, the tendency of matter to persist, and the ways in which the imprint humans leave on the material realm bridges and blurs delineations between past, present, and future – for better or for worse.

Produced and presented through support from the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. Curatorial guidance and support from Ivan Jurakic. Panoramic photos and video by Bob McNair.

Hamilton City Magazine article by Stephanie Vegh LINK

The Conversation article by Chris Myhr LINK