Risa Horowitz

Bio

Risa Horowitz is a visual and media artist and assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Regina. Her art practice blurs boundaries between expertamateur,

hobby-work, and leisure-productivity. Exploring intersections of creative practices and science, she has recently taken up amateur astronomy and

astrophotography in order to collect images of the planet Saturn, highlighting how common interests can be conflated to bridge disciplinary divide.

Horowitz has lived and worked in seven Canadian provinces as an artist, educator, writer, and gallery programmer, and is represented in Toronto by MKG127

Gallery in Toronto. She received her PhD in Visual Art (studio) from York university in 2012, and her MFA from the University of Saskatchewan in 2000.

Artist’s Statement

I am a conceptual visual and media artist who employs photo-based and extended studio practices. Most of my work involves the creation and representation of

collections and endurance practices. Central to my work is a deconstructive approach to exploring art and everyday life and the binaries of expert/amateur,

hobby/work, and leisure/productivity, using a range of media and approaches. My recent practice tends to muddy the divisions made between the worlds of visual

and media art, the art world and the university, and amateur and professional astronomy.

I began Imaging Saturn in 2011. The project emerged from my experience of seeing Saturn through a telescope for the  rst time in May 2010. That viewing was a

profound and sublime personal experience, raising questions about the incomprehensible scale of the universe and our ability to make sense of that scale in

concrete or intuitive ways.

At the core of the project is an ongoing collection that captures images of Saturn for each year of its orbit around the sun: 29.42 earth years. Since the project began I

have collected and exhibited images using a range of telescopes; created and exhibited a series of drawings to visualize relevant planetary and galactic motions;

conducted research into the history of astronomical observing and modeling instruments; and am currently producing a set of micro-controlled kinetic sculptures

of the planet that will animate Saturn’s motion against its backdrop of constellations over 30 years, supported by a Canada Council Grant for Media Artists.