Artist Bio                          

Born in 1980, west coast based artist Joshua Van Dyke studied at Emily Carr University for two years before graduating from The Glasgow School of Art in 2007. While still a student, he began collecting and hording used skateboard decks in his studio, perhaps in a misguided attempt to revisit his youth. This was the start of an intuitively driven and labour intensive process of reworking and altering the material into masks, animal heads, and floor based sculptures. A visual language began to emerge, and continuing with this process led him to do the series of antler sculptures that examine modern hunting ritual and its trophies.  In these works, scale, colour, and a fetishized attention to detail, further distort the decks and play against gender associations.  These works incorporate humour and beauty into a hybrid mix of consumerist artifact and memento. Among other things, they look at our inherent tendency to collect and display.

Van Dyke has recently exhibited work in Finland, and is part of the Whistler Live Exhibition at the Club Intrawest Hotel and Millennium place throughout the Olympics.  He is currently completing a large-scale public art installation on Bowen Island.  See website for details. www.finalcrit.com/art/joshuavandyke