Nationality Canadian Books Death and the Family | Known for Photography, | |
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Born 1948 Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan Education Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of New Mexico People also search for Deirdre Boyle, Marian Penner Bancroft, Gisele Amantea | ||
Sandra Semchuk (born 1948) is a Canadian photographic artist.
Contents
- Career
- Collaboration with James Nicholas
- Education
- Select Solo Exhibitions
- Collections
- Publications
- References
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.
Sandra was awarded a grant from 2008-2015 from the Canada First World War Internment Fund to complete her book on Ukrainian's in Canada "The Stories Were Not Told: Stories and Photographs from Canada's First Internment Camps, 1914-1920".
Career
Semchuk’s early photographic works have been said to belong to a “broad general category of documentary”. 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 whilst presenting a narrative of “self-examination and transformation” through her use of self-portraits and images containing domestic and prairie backgrounds.
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.” 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.”
Collaboration with James Nicholas
James Nicholas & Sandra Semchuk were married until James died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2007. James was a Cree artist from Nelson House Manitoba. He suffered extensively in Residential schools as a child. Their collaborative work focussed on the multiplicity of relationships to land, cultural geography, settler and indigenous relationships and memory.