| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Edmontonian conceptual artist, print-maker, collage-crafter, and graphic designer Gerry Dotto combines photography and typography to create intriguing and sometimes humourous juxtapositions. His work discusses how people interact with the profusion of signs, labels, consumer packaging, environmental graphics, and advertising that populate contemporary life.
After earning his diploma in Visual Communications at the Alberta College of Art + Design (1981), Dotto employed his extensive knowledge of design procedures, silkscreen and letterpress printing, and prop and sign production, to begin his graphic art and design career in publishing, education, and television. As technology progressed, he garnered expertise in a range of digital drafting and design tools which he applied not only to his art, but his work at Alberta’s educational television network ACCESS, as a magazine designer, as Senior Graphic Artist and cover designer at HR Media’s nine publishing arms (including Alberta’s Lone Pine Publishing), and as a coordinator and director of photo shoots. He also was a board member for Edmonton’s Books Collective that published the work of Albertan poets, artists, science fiction, and fantasy novelists. He wrote and illustrated My Tongue All Thumbs (Slipstream Books, December 1997), a book of poetry and art.
Edmonton, Fort McMurray, and Calgary have hosted Dotto’s solo exhibitions, including Don’t Let the Flakes Out. A range of public and corporate collections, including those of Esso and the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta, hold his work. Dozens of photography annuals, exhibition catalogues, and journals have published his art, including PrairieSeen Notes, Camera Obscura, Other Voices, Blue Buffalo, and Borderlands. Dotto has won a range of commendations, including a gold medal from Gallery Photographica’s New Images Photography Awards (2012) and an Award of Merit from Montreal’s Salon d’oeuvres sur papier. |