Artist Biography
Meichen Waxer is a queer visual artist, curator and arts worker living in Toronto. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Recent exhibitions include The Plumb, Toronto, Ministry of Casual Living, Victoria, Canada; CSA Space, Vancouver, Canada, Mr. Lee’s Shed, Vancouver Canada; #3 Gallery, Vancouver Canada; halka sanat projesi, Istanbul, Turkey; and Open Studio, Toronto. Artist residencies have included Treignac Projet, France; Anvil Centre, New Westminster and Halka Sanat, Istanbul, Turkey as well as Turkish Cultural Foundation Fellow.
Meichen is Co-Director and Co-Founder of Arts Assembly. Arts Assembly is a community-focused arts organization that emphasizes artistic collaboration, discursive research and reciprocal exchange.
Artist Statement
Through collage, sculpture, installation, and image-based media, I reinterpret the colonized and homogenized aesthetic which shaped many formative experiences and understandings. This is a way to explore my femme queer and mixed cultural Jewish identity. My work brings forward objects which usually exist in our periphery, imbued with histories which have been eroded through reiteration. I see this as very much in line with a diasporic experience. I am interested in unpacking how the ornamental references and material culture which have directly framed my relationship to home have also shaped intimate understandings of the self. I grew up at arm’s reach from my diasporic Jewish family, culture, and what could have been community, in an environment drenched in a pattern of colonial textures, aesthetics, and objects that left no space to imagine another.
Memory is a theme, both my own and in a larger cultural sense, as I explore the difficulty of locating my own history within a culture which worked specifically to obscure it, both that of queerness and Judaism. The idea of taste is constantly at stake in my work, as a seemingly polite cover for narratives of erasure.
I am thankful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for my current research.
