bio

Brief biography:

Justin Wonnacott was born in Belleville, Ontario in 1950. He is a photographer who also teaches, curates and writes about his subject from time to time. He has exhibited photographs regularly since 1974, and in 1992 began using computers as a tool to help make his artwork. Many of his large works are montages that use constructed imagery and integral texts to refer to his dialogue with pictures as an image maker and consumer.

Parallel to this project he also makes portfolios informed by photography’s history and personal documentary. Recent projects in this area include a large body of work dealing with public art, an extensive examination of Ottawa’s Somerset Street West made over a decade, images of fish titled “I remember + I forget” and a new work in progress which is made from hundreds of images of people taken on city streets.Common to all his work is a persistent interest in what photographs are, as ideas and objects and how they are deployed and used in art and popular culture. The current value of photography in society is a constant thread seen in all the work he produces.

His work has been seen in many solo and group exhibitions in Canada and shown abroad. His work is collected by the Canada Council Art Bank; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; National Archives of Canada , The Ottawa Art Gallery, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, the City of Ottawa and others. He has been commissioned to create permanent public works of art in Ottawa and Toronto.

He has curated exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Ottawa Art Gallery, SAW Gallery, and Kijkhuis, Den Haag, Holland,.He has taught at the University of Ottawa, the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, and the Ottawa School of Art. In 2005 he received the Karsh Award from the City of Ottawa for his work.

In 2009 he was inducted as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy