| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Miriam Bankey uses her work to explore more than the simple representation of objects, but also the creation of objects by paint as a sculptural medium. “Paint (as the only material, using no canvas) acts on its own accord,” she writes, explaining that the substance “rips, cracks, fissures, and sags. The process and end product becomes saturated and excessive.” Her process involves using floors as her workbench, upon which she pours paint in multiple layers later to dry and hang vertically. During such “mounting”—whose results Bankey calls “suspended animation”—the paint stretches and produces bubbles and cracks with “a potential energy that is disguised as dormancy.”
After earning her BFA in Painting from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2002), Miriam Bankey worked as a gallery assistant at the Stride Gallery in Calgary (2002), and as an invigilator, front of house assistant, and gallery assistant for Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2007). She’s launched several solo exhibitions in Calgary, including Excess at the Marion Nicoll Gallery and Too Much of a Good Thing at the Stride Gallery +15 Window. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Artrageous 3 at Calgary’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery and Garden of Earthly Delights at the Stride Gallery, Calgary and the Postcard Show at Melbourne’s Linden Arts Centre.
Bankey lives and works in Calgary. |