Working Stiffs

Shane Golby has been a practicing artist for over thirty years.  For the first twenty years of his artistic career he focused on still-life and landscape subjects.  The works produced during these years were drawn from his travels in Africa, northern Alberta, and the Canadian Arctic.  While focusing on the natural world, these earlier works, produced in a variety of drawing and painting media with an emphasis on chalk pastels, also examined a variety of personal concerns such as isolation and loss.  In 1997 Shane returned to the University of Alberta as a special student in the Faculty of Fine Arts.  His university studies, which continued until 2001, involved printmaking, acrylic painting and clay figurative sculpture.  These studies profoundly influenced his artistic concerns and style, expanding his artistic vision to include investigations into popular culture and socio-political concerns. In these explorations he has embraced a mixed media style of expression using acrylics, concrete, text, gel-transfer and photomontage to construct collage and sculptural relief works.