Pearl Van Geest
Pearl Van Geest (she/they) is a queer Canadian artist, writer and arts educator, practicing since graduating from art school (OCAD) in 1996. She also holds a BSc, MFA and BEd. Her work is included in private and public collections, including the Canadian Arts Council’s Art Bank and has been supported through grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. She was short-listed for the RBC Painting prize in 2003.
Van Geest has led workshops and programs in a number of public art galleries and curatorial agencies. Most recently, she co-curated Creative Dissent, at the Art Gallery of Guelph (2023).
Van Geest was Guelph’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence in 2014, the AIR at The Museum (2005, Kitchener-Waterloo), and has attended other residences, retreats, and conferences including Banff Centre, Est-Nord-Est and Broken Forests 2022.
Van Geest was the recipient of the Canadian Art Foundation’s Art Writing Prize in 2015. She has written a number of exhibition essays, and reviews for Memento, C-Magazine, and Canadian Art magazine.
She is currently sessional faculty in Visual Arts Department at Brock University and a new member of the Throbbing Rose collective currently focused on ideas of queer ecology.
In her own work, informed by theories of queer ecology Van Geest explores the connection between the human/animal body and the natural world, working towards the blurring of commonly perceived binaries and dichotomies. In the most recent work, Van Geest uses photographs taken while paddling along shorelines of lakes and rivers – from southern Ontario, upstate New York and in the northern Ontario parks of Temagami, Algonquin and Pukaskwa. They are from times where the surface of the water is like glass, reflecting rocks and trees of the forests. In rotating the images in a bisymmetrically vertical orientation openings, imagery resembling body parts and creatures appear and disappear suggesting interconnectivity and fluidity the macro and micro, the biotic and abiotic, and the human and non-human.
For more information visit: www.pearlvangeest.cm
