Art Career
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 The 2016 Sobey Art Award - Charles Stankievech (2:10 min), National Gallery of Canada, retrieved 27 April 2025 – via YouTube |
Many of his works critically engage military architecture and surveillance and is a driving force behind the idea of fieldwork in contemporary art. [2] [3]
Stankievech participated in the Canadian Forces Artists Program twice, in 2011 and 2015, creating a "transformation" of the program through critical contemporary art [4] . His 2013 35mm film installation The Soniferous Æther of the Land Beyond the Land Beyond was shot over the course of two weeks at CFS Alert (the northernmost settlement on Earth), and is part of a series of fieldworks he made that look at remote outpost architecture, military infrastructure, and the embedded landscape. [5] The film, along with a custom built 35mm film looping projection system, is part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collection. [6]
In 2014, Stankievech's exhibition Counterintelligence premiered at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto. A "careful archival research" exhibition with "provocative implications" according to Artforum, [7] Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star described it as "a dizzying array of material, some of it absurd, much of it shocking". [8] The exhibition was awarded both Thematic Exhibition of the Year and best Catalogue Essay for 2014 by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. [9] In 2011 Stankievech was the West Coast and Yukon nominee and in 2016 the Ontario nominee for the Sobey Art Award. [10] Stankievech's exhibition Monuments as Ruin was awarded an Ontario Association of Art Galleries 2015 Exhibition of the Year Award and was acquired by the AEAC at Queen's University. [11]
Stankievech's ambitious exhibition The Desert Turned To Glass (2023) was commissioned for the centenary of the invention of the planetarium and revolved around an immersive film "The Eye of Silence" projected on a dome screen. [12] The work in its various forms has since toured from Calgary to Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Oakville, Prague, Munich, and the Rjiksmuseum Twenthe. [13]
