Bio

Sharon Alward is a Canadian video and performance artist. Her creative works reference performance, installation and ritual as sites transformation. Interested in activism and the role of the artist, Alward explores ritual as a means to subvert social constructs, cultural norms and collective memory and as a process to transcend suffering, provide opportunities for wholeness and as a process for healing.

Cited as one of the 100 most innovative Canadians in MacLean’s magazine she has exhibited throughout Canada, the U.S., U.K., France, Spain and the Netherlands, including the Liverpool Tracey Biennial, LACE in Los Angeles, the American Film Institute, Western Front, and the National Screen Institute. Sharon has been nominated for an Art Pace Fellowship and a National Screen Institute Blizzard Award for Best Experimental Film. The recipient of numerous grants and teaching awards, she is a Full Professor at the University of Manitoba, School of Art.

Works

Zuma

  • 2012
  • Sharon Alward

Zuma explores the social construction of shadow mothers.

Zuma

Exiled Mothers

  • 2015
  • Sharon Alward

In the stories of adoption, the mothers who gave birth were invisible. Exiled Mothers takes us on the artist Sharon Alward’s journey to recover her own repressed, secret, shaming memories from relinquishing her daughter in 1971.

Exiled Mothers

August

  • 2001
  • Sharon Alward

A ritual of grief and expiation, "August" looks to the sky as a means to connect to the infinity of creation and the source of awareness. Mystics believe that the awareness of this unity may be sufficient to carry us through our most difficult times. The artist reflects on her past as she contemplates her impending mortality.

August

Contre Bande

  • 2001
  • Sharon Alward

Contre Bande is about the power of sexual play/pleasure and the attempt to filter these images through strict cultural hierarchies. In much of the work I do sexuality becomes an oscillation - a diabolical double sex that breaks with all oppositions and hierarchies. In the performance/ video installation Contre Bande, each sex binds one to the other, speaking the language of the other; binding and counter-binding.

Contre Bande

St. John the Baptist

  • 1999
  • Sharon Alward

St. John the Baptist, Performance/ Installation with video- 4 monitors and video projection "One may not be capable of loving, except for loving someone who loves." –Baudrillard.

St. John the Baptist

Covenant

  • 1996
  • Sharon Alward

Covenant explores the differences between traditional history and effective history in an attempt to reconcile an ancient biblical narrative.

Covenant

Mutterwitz

  • 1992
  • Sharon Alward

Mutterwitz is a symbolic drama, exploring Kant’s notion of judgement and the representation of a relationship between thinking and judging. The layering of images, and the competing presence of spectacle, create a theater of questioning and debate.

Mutterwitz

Totentanz (Dance of Death)

  • 1991
  • Sharon Alward

Commissioned by the Plug In Gallery to do a Performance/ Installation for ART OVER AIDS in November 1990, Alward poured 5 gallons of blood and semen on the floor of the gallery during a private ritual of mourning, and spent the next several hours cleaning it up.

Totentanz (Dance of Death)