William Gill (Will Gill) was born in 1968 and raised in Ottawa, Ontario. He studied sculpture and printmaking at Mount Allison University and graduated with a BFA in 1991. He moved from Halifax to St John’s, Newfoundland in 1997. Gill has exhibited sculpture and painted works across Canada and is represented by the Leyton Gallery in St John’s and Peak Gallery in Toronto. He has received project grants from many funding sources including The Canada Council and The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. His work is in private collections in Canada and the USA, the permanent collection of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick and the public collection of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. He has participated in creative residencies in Newfoundland, Vermont and Alberta. Gill was named to the regional (maritime provinces and NL) shortlist for the Sobey Art Award for the 2004 and 2006 competitions (Canadas premiere award for contemporary art for artists under 40). He was honoured in the spring of 2005 and 2007 by being named to the top three shortlist for the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Councils’ Artist of the Year award. Gills work was included in a two person exhibition(along with Beth Oberholtzer ) called “Where Wonder, What Weight” at the Rooms Provincial Gallery in St John’s in February 2006. He won the “Large Year Award” from Visual Artists of Newfoundland and Labrador in the spring of 2006.

White Noise
Poetic and probing, the new work of artist Will Gill offers a stream of sounds and objects, observations and ideas, fragments that are not simply background hum but the very substance of everyday life. Softly drawn into this series is a stream of details – a stove pipe, car, shovel, stars, bright paintball splotches, doughnut, road, perfume, a striped jumper, swimming pool, baby cup, flowers, machine gun, crashing airplanes, a wisp of smoke. Fusing direct and mediated encounters, the images suggest ways the pervasive presence of technology, media, war, and their consequences do not threaten the edges of our lives, rather how their combinatory nature itself saturates the core of contemporary experience.

The interaction of differing materials and concepts has been an ongoing exploration for Gill. Here, from the hint of stars in daylight of the inlaid wood of “Quiet Again,” to the collaged commercial strip with its masked fast food signs of “The Golden Mile,” Gill works through connecting, embedding, and burying, collapsing the distance between imagination and reality, strange and familiar. In this way, his images mimic all small tactics of making do and making sense, showing the ways modernity and what is assumed to be artificial or technology-induced becomes organic and meaningful in unknown and often unintended ways.

While flashes of story, cipher, or game seem to interrupt the surface of the works, there is no key offered to a larger narrative or logic. Whimsical yet slightly ominous, the images simultaneously suggest how human it is to find everything – dread, mystery, wonder, comfort – within a world that is essentially constituted by a stream of images and sounds. Gill’s landscapes are remembered and, therefore, layered and muted: “Oil Tankers on Southside Hills,” are superimposed with a child’s pink boots, “Headlights” cutting across a dark road take on the symbolic shapes of comic book aesthetic, and the sea that receives “Plane Down” also gives rise to “Sunset Iceberg.” Yet where a sunset and its overwhelming brilliance may be the product of environmental toxins, and awe-inspiring icebergs become increasingly mythical with global warming, the work of Will Gill offers clues to the blurred natural and unnatural dimensions of an ever-pulsating world that deeply touches each of us.
Shauna McCabe

Shauna McCabe
Shauna McCabe has been Director of The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador since 2005 and was appointed Canada Research Chair in Critical Theory in the Interpretation of Culture at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, commencing June 2007. McCabe completed her doctoral research at the University of British Columbia where she explored critical landscape aesthetics in contemporary art. She writes frequently on art, culture, and architecture.