This autumn, the Canadian artist Matt Shane came to Laholm to live and work for two weeks. His colleague Jim Holyoak, also from Canada, participated digitally. Their collaboration resulted in the exhibition “Walloways”.
Worked together for 20 years
Matt and Jim have worked together for twenty years, and their art has been exhibited around the world. As well as doing collaborative works, they also have their respective solo practices. Together they create large, organic drawing installations that cover the walls and have a strong sense of nature. The viewer is invited into a landscape where wilderness merges with partly weathered human creations, and where beasts and beings, both real and imaginary, coexist.
Matt Shane, born in 1981 in Vancouver, works as an artist and art teacher in Montréal, in the province of Québec. Drawing and painting, he often uses themes where civilization is entwined with, merged with, and deconstructed by wilderness. Jim Holyoak was born in the United States in 1978 but grew up in the small town of Aldergrove, Canada. Today he works as an artist and writer based in the province of British Columbia. Jim’s main focus is drawing, and he often returns to themes of wild nature inhabited by creatures and beings, both real and imagined.
Artist in residence
The residency project is a collaboration between Teckningsmuseet and Konst i Halland, a regional resource center run by Halland’s Art Museum in collaboration with Region Halland. The residency (and exhibition) was originally supposed to be in the spring/summer of 2020 but was postponed due to the corona pandemic. (A residency is when an artist or group of artists is invited to a city/place/institution to live and work for a period of time.)
Above: Quagmire, 2011. Photo: Yannick Grandmont
