| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario-born artist Dana Holst is best known for her painting, drawing, and printmaking. Having earned her B.F.A. with Honours from the University of Waterloo (1995), Holst focused her artistic output on depictions and considerations of gender inequality, stereotypes, and power struggles. Vue Weekly wrote that Holst’s Prey series “evokes an era of garters and garlands…. [The] mostly silverpoint illustrations [of] prepubescent cherub-faced girls [are] innocent and virtuous, too young to be fully sexualised, yet not too young to be gendered…. [E]ach girl can simultaneously hold the vacant gaze of the lost or the sinister stare of the possessed.” Other works include giant portraits of nude White women standing awkwardly in harsh pink lighting, alternately vulnerable and confrontational.
Holst has mounted several solo exhibitions, including The Tell-Tale Heart at Ottawa’s Galerie St-Laurent, Lo and Behold at Toronto’s Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Sometimes Rainbows Are Black at White Water Gallery in North Bay, Ontario, and Prey at Edmonton’s Latitude 53.
Holst has received numerous grants: one from the Toronto Arts Council, two from the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation of Rothesay, New Brunswick, two from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, two from the Canada Council, and ten from the Ontario Arts Council. She’s won several awards, including Best in Show and the Toronto Sun Best Drawing Award at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, the Jurors’ Award for Best Drawing at the Peel Regional Art Gallery, and the Nancy Lou Patterson Award for Drawing and Lithography.
Several collections house her work, including those of the Kingston’s Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Sin-Forest Corporation of Mississauga, and the Canada Council Art Bank. |