Lisa Mayes

As an interdisciplinary artist, my practice unfolds through installation, painting, printmaking, and video. 

My research-creation focuses on the bricolage of colonial and postcolonial diasporic displacement within the histories of indentured, transatlantic slavery, highland clearances, and chosen migrations. Personal archives are excavated and interrogated in search of missing voices, inherited voids,  apparitions of ancestral landscapes, and family portraits. Utilizing print, paintings, and digital media to form a cohesive installation, I create a rendering of ‘homeland’ from landscapes found on the web, photographs, or during Plein-air expeditions. Through the modalities of research linked to the production of meaning and art-making, I strive to counterbalance the social, and structural constraints and impact of the dominant colonial cultures, on global migration and the lived realities of those who embody intersectionality of ‘mixed race’, ‘bicultural identity, and ‘multiple identities’.

BIOGRAPHY:

Currently a primary instructor in Media Art and recent MFA graduate in Intermedia from the University of Alberta, Art & Design, Lisa Mayes holds a BFA in Studio Art and Art Education from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

As an intermedia artist, Mayes draws from her personal experiences and her interest in languages, marketing, psychology and education. Much of her work investigates particular modes or ways in which something exists or is experienced or expressed while dealing with topics about global migration, sociopolitical diasporic identities, and the renegotiation of social and structural constraints created by dominant colonial cultures.

 

Mayes’s work has been exhibited nationally, in Edmonton, Vancouver, and Montreal, at the Royal Alberta Museum, FAB Gallery, Alberta Art Gallery, Scott Gallery, and Latitude 53.