Varied Editions Featured Artist

Varied Editions Online Exhibition: Sandra Haar

Sandra Haar is a Toronto-based artist and printmaker, who works in installation, bookwork and flat formats. Throughout her artistic practice, she has focused on issues of representation and subjectivity, investigating a range of personal and cultural concerns.

Galut and crown are two bodies of work that are based in popular icons and idioms, rooted in Jewish themes, and engage linguistic variation in the diaspora. The Galut serigraphs use popular culture and language to view aspects of contemporary Jewish identity, featuring transliteration as a metaphor for authenticity and identification. Each print features a sampling of performers, advertisements and other popular culture artifacts, wherein gestures, style and practices become markers of visibility. The prints feature texts in English/Hebrew translation and transliteration. The crown series brings together the exalted and the debased to explore the transformation of states of being within subjective, interpersonal, cultural and spiritual realms. Exile and yearning are the central themes. The images are photo-based, and are produced by drawing, papercut or digital processes before final production as serigraph. Textual litanies featured are composed directly from or inspired by personal sources, prayer texts and scholarly works.

Haar’s art has been exhibited locally and regionally, including Gallery 44 (Toronto), Forest City Gallery (London) and La Centrale (Montréal), and available through Librairie Formats (Montréal), Printed Matter (New York), and Art Metropole (Toronto), among other venues. Reviews and articles on her art have appeared in a variety of arts and general publications, including the collection Textura : l’artiste écrivant / the artist writing. Her occasional writing on Jewish themes has appeared in Bridges, Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme, and Tessera. Ms. Haar is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art (New Media Arts).

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