Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire: Funny Bone, Wish Bone, Back Bone

This major retrospective exhibition traces the over 60-year artistic career of the boldly irreverent and equally influential Alberta artist John Will. Featuring prints, paintings, photography, video and works on paper, John Will: Born in the U.F.O. will be the largest and most complete exhibition of John Will’s work to date. Will is known for his humour, play with notions of truth, and a fascination into his own place in the world as an individual and an artist. His satirical and insightful paintings and works on paper are created through a process of collecting fragments of language from a wide variety of sources: news, popular media, adages, slang as well as found and taken photographs to re-work them into insightful, often hysterical and sometimes uncomfortable new interpretations. This exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta and curated by Catherine Crowston. John Will (b. 1939, Waterloo, Iowa) is a senior Alberta-based painter, photographer, printmaker, and performance artist whose career spans more than six decades. His work probes identity, personal origin, and the many absurdities of contemporary life. Widely celebrated as an image maker and incisive wordsmith, Will’s recent practice focuses on text-based paintings and works on paper, reconstructing fragments of language into witty, darkly humorous, and poignant reflections. His work is held in major public and private collections across North America, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, New York Public Library, Nickle Galleries, Art Institute of Chicago, and Glenbow Museum, among others.