Sherry Czekuz

Sherry Czekus is a Canadian painter based in Waterloo, ON, who completed her MFA at University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Studio Specialization from University of Waterloo and a Bachelor of Education from Wilfrid Laurier University. The public domain, specifically the city, is a site of observation of urban crowd culture and its participants that Czekus explores through painting.

Making my paintings begins with becoming one of the crowd as part of the everyday experience. On busy city sidewalks with my camera, I make my source images of the urban crowd and its figurative gestures, intersections and spaces between its members. Since the emergence of flaneurism and urban culture in 19th century Europe, the online social frontier has recently developed and has changed our visual perception of the physical crowd experience. Painting, as a conceptual medium, simultaneously expands and collapses these moments I capture as an enriched site of knowledge about us as a collective. Straddling the boundaries of representation and abstraction, I allow the photographic language give way to the language of painting.