ART INTERRUPTIONS

From February through May 2022, regional artist Amy Bagshaw will be animating transitional and unique spaces at the Orillia Museum of Art & History (OMAH) with her Art Interruptions Project.  Installed in public hours over the course of four weeks, these site-specific fibre art installations will be placed in unusual spaces: vaults, jail cells, hallways, and windows to highlight and engage with aspects of space and place. The goals of this project are to draw attention to OMAH’s unique site in a pandemic world, to playfully participate with audiences through the installation process and final works, and to remind viewers of the specific relationships born between the collection/art works and their layered and meaningful contexts.  In connection to the Colour with a U and From Marbles to Minecraft: A Century of Childhood exhibitions, the Art Interruptions Project will bring viewers back into museum spaces to recall the inherent qualities of being enveloped by art and design.

ARTIST BIO

Amy Bagshaw (she/her) earned her BFA from Queen’s University in 2002, and MFA from Stony Brook University, New York, with a focus on fibre installation and intermedia in 2006.  A Graduate Women’s Studies Scholar, her art practice extends to Intersectional Feminism and contemporary craft practices. She has exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe and has created public art for the City of Barrie and Alliston, ON.

Bagshaw has received an Ontario Arts Council Grant, has had a Residency at The Banff Centre and her work can be seen on the cover of Feminist Time Against Nation Time (Dietrich and Hesford, 2008) and Brava Kilo’s album cover Hang On, You Demons (2018).  Her paper “Notes from the Portal: Feminist Teaching Strategies in/post-pandemic Art and Design Classrooms,” was published in Teaching in a Post-COVID Era (Springer, 2021). She teaches in the Fine Art and IDesign departments of X University (Ryerson), Georgian College, and Yorkville University.  She lives in Alliston, ON with her family.