Artist

Nat Cann is a Canadian artist of settler ancestry. Since graduating from Mount Allison University, and becoming the New Brunswick provincial winner of the 2012 BMO Art 1st Prize, Nat has enjoyed exhibiting work across Canada in public galleries, artist-run centers, and workshops dabbling in new media, assemblage, experimental printmaking and critical inspections of heritage. Such ideas have been explored from coast to coast via residencies and workshops in lands both fantastic and remote. 

Painting and assemblage, art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist; think Picasso’s cubist oddities, or really anything from the 60’s. Present escapades into this domain have unraveled a more zen approach, particularly that of edo-period enso painters whose inky abstracts recalibrated the act of making into a meditative process; to paint and assemble simple shapes for the sake of creation, aesthetics and abstractive expression. This of course roughens the greater zen thinker’s notions, but it offers reflection to the artist nevertheless.

Current printed matter focuses on the haunting of lands—relentless industries keeping afloat Atlantic Canadian notions of heritage even if those intentions sometimes find themselves misguided. Occasionally these inspections take the form of installations documenting the haunting of a place. The haunting in this instance does not refer to a ghost or supernatural thing, but that which draws inquisitiveness of such places be it history, the landscape, the people or something sacred. Such inspections have taken Nat to Ontario, Alberta, the Magdalen Isles of Quebec, and to every corner of New Brunswick. The result is an accumulation of Victorian houses, industrial landscapes, wild surroundings and forlorn steads mingled together so as to depict the typical Atlantic withering—nature reclaiming the settler’s notion of heritage.