Matt Shane 2011 Winsor Gallery Award Winner (Concordia University, Montréal, QC)

Matt Shane's "Cast Away" (2010), oil on canvas, 56" x 90"

Artist Matt Shane is the 2011 recipient of the Winsor Gallery Graduate Student Award at Concordia University.  Each year, the award is given to one graduate student from Concordia University in Montréal, QC, and one from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.  At Concordia, the award helps the graduate student complete their residency in the Graduate Studio Arts Program.

Matt was born in Vancouver, and grew up in nearby Tsawwassen. He received his BFA with honours and distinction from the University of Victoria in 2004, before being accepted into the Masters program at Concordia University, where he is currently enrolled and specializing in painting and drawing.

Travelling the world, especially through Asia when he was just out of high school, gave Matt an appreciation for the Earth's diverse landforms.  His interest in the land also began to reveal the way in which human beings have altered the natural landscape to fit their own necessities, and how, in turn, the environment effects us and our attempts at civilization and industrialization.

Of his own work, Matt states:

"Painting is a forum that allows me to excavate, build up, burn down and rearrange space. The canvas is like a construction site, a garden, a sandbox--it changes much over time. The world I paint is mercurial, and it is not a world I completely understand. It is a world of mountains, pits, rivers, wells, gullies and ghost towns. I paint from an alien’s perspective, hovering above the land. I think about what the world looks like now, and what it will look like in a thousand years. What happens to our cities when resources are exhausted? What do we make of a landscape full of human intention but empty of human presence?"