Artist Bio 

Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. He has performed and exhibited across Canada, notably at The Art Gallery of York University, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, and at Plug-In ICA, and as part of the first Toronto Biennial, as well as internationally, at Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia, in the Antarctic Biennial, and at Titanik Gallery in Finland. Lou has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY., La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as participant and faculty at The Banff Centre. He has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018, 2020 and 2021, and was the winner of the Emerging Atlantic Artist Award in 2017. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia. 

Artist Statement 

My work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. I am committed to questioning and disrupting systems of power, by deconstructing the language, architectures, genealogies and taxonomies that hold these systems in place. Through unruly research methods I look for what isn’t present, what is in between, what isn’t said, and use processes of metaphor, semiotic shift, translation, and negative-space readings to evoke these in between - out of bounds spaces. 

This research is evidenced through graphic notations, scripts and scores which are often performed in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings. These scores often define spaces of loss, erasure, tension, or relationality. I began working with graphic scores as a way of moving away from fixed ideas of notation, creating scores that define a time and place rather than an action within them. 

My work is often theatrical, and can engage audiences as performers in the works. This can happen explicitly, through the presentation of a script or score for an audience to follow, or more subtly, by presenting interactive installations that implicate the bodies of audience members in the presentation of the work. Recently I have become more focused on the architectures of performance spaces, and the possibilities for these spaces to be place for audience and performer to rehearse alternative, speculative futures.