Eric Glavin

b. 1965, Canada/USA

For the past six years I have been photographically documenting the façades of post-war buildings in Toronto, as well as in other urban centres, and using these photographs as a basis for constructing abstracted versions of these façades on the computer. I have concentrated for the most part on documenting high-rises and townhouse developments, in particular those provided for low-income tenants, and recently I have completed a series of images based on the façades of public schools in the Greater Toronto Area.

My interest in using these façades was mainly because of their reference to grids and geometric patterns in modernist, hard-edge painting. I wanted to create ready-made paintings which blurred the distinctions between abstract and representational imagery. At the same time, it was very clear from my perspective that these types of buildings – unspecific and undistinguished architecture from the 1960s and 1970s – dominated my experience of the cities I visited, and that in many ways they functioned as a literal embodiment of larger issues present within the urban environment.

Parallel to this ongoing project I have also been creating large-scale wall paintings using various abstract motifs which I have taken from a wide spectrum of sources, including construction hoarding, bus graphics and product packaging. These wall paintings are intended to replicate, from a critical perspective, the relationship of colourful, hard-edge, nonrepresentational graphics to the architecture of the urban environment which contextualises them.

(Text: a sense of place catalogue, 2007)