Sandra Semchuck | |
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Born | 1948 Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada |
Education | Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan, 1970 Masters Degree in Photography, University of New Mexico, 1983 |
Known for | Photographer |
Spouse | James Nicholas (d. 2007) |
Awards | Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2018) |
Sandra Semchuk (born 1948) is a Canadian photographic artist. [1] In addition to exhibiting across Canada and internationally, Semchuk taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design from 1987 to 2018. [2]
In 1998, Presentation House, Vancouver, B.C. programmed "How Far Back is Home ..." a 25-year retrospective of Semchuk's career highlighting her relationship to identity, morality and land. [3]
Sandra was awarded a grant from 2008 to 2015 from the Canada First World War Internment Fund to complete her book on Ukrainians in Canada, The Stories Were Not Told: Stories and Photographs from Canada's First Internment Camps, 1914-1920. [4]
Semchuk was raised in a close-knit Ukrainian-Canadian community, which greatly informed the theme of interconnected identity in her practice. [2] Her work from the late 1970s involved dialogue and collaboration with her parents, partner, and young daughter. [2] Semchuk's early photographic works have been said to belong to a "broad general category of documentary". [5] Her photographic portrait works from this era, more specifically her 1982 series of eighty-seven photographs entitled Excerpts from a Diary, address themes of death and family [6] whilst presenting a narrative of "self-examination and transformation" through her use of self-portraits and images containing domestic and prairie backgrounds. [7]
Penny Cousineau-Levine, the author of Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination, writes of Excerpts from a Diary that the journey of Semchuk's protagonist “follows the structure of classic initiatory voyages of descent and return, death and rebirth, the prototype of which is the Greek legend … of Orpheus, who, grief-stricken at the death of his wife, descends to the underworld to convince the god Pluto to allow her to return to earth.” [8] Cousineau-Levine goes on to state that these photographic sequences "take the shape of heroic descent into darkness and peril, into an experience of death and nothingness followed by rebirth, a transformed relation to the self, and a renewed connection to life", something that she claims offers “an understanding of death that is particularly relevant to Canadian photography.” [8]
James Nicholas and Sandra Semchuk were married until Nicholas died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2007. Nicholas was a Cree artist from Nelson House, Manitoba. He suffered extensively in residential schools as a child. [9] Their collaborative work focused on the multiplicity of relationships to land, cultural geography, settler and indigenous relationships and memory. [10]
In 2013, Sandra Semchuk worked with performance artist Skeena Reece on a piece titled Touch Me for the exhibition Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. During this performance, Reece and Semchuk struggle with themes of forgiveness and mother-daughter relationships as Reece bathes Semchuk. [11]
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