Artist

Barbara Greczny

Barbara Greczny was born in Uranium City, Saskatchewan which is now one of the largest ghost towns in Canada. She moved to Toronto when she 5 years old and has never left.

Barbara’s classical training in portrait photography led her to photograph her first series simply titled The Nude.She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997 winning the William F. White prize for film/video and the Ross Fletcher film award. She returned to OCAD University and upgraded her AOCAD to a BFA in Integrated Media. Currently she is an MFA candidate in the Documentary Media program at Ryerson University and is working on a multimedia installation for her thesis that explores dementia and has it’s roots in the mother-daughter relationship.

Her photography and film/video artwork explores beauty, decay and questions issues regarding the body, life, death, homelessness, war and religion. She was a core member of Symbiosis (1992 –1997) a multi-disciplinary arts collective committed to the integration of various disciplines - performance, video, installation, new media, painting and sculpture - within the context of site-specific non-traditional exhibition spaces.

The collectives previous art interventions in compelling sites such as a nineteenth century church, a twentieth century cosmetic surgery clinic, and a turn-of-the-millennium banking institution, provided an environment which encouraged dialogue between audience, artworks, site and conceptual ideas of space.

Recently her video and photography work have been exhibited during Scotia Bank’s Nuit Blanche and she has co-curated two art shows that were held at Beaver Hall Gallery in Toronto. Her photo-video piece Soul Trip 999 (Nuite Blanche 2008) was highlighted on an online magazine Sensitive Skin and received three times the hits it got on Youtube. She has been busy creating new work that will be entered into some up coming festivals.

Artist Code: 594

Videography

Homefree

1997, 40:00 minutes, colur, English

Vial Upon the Sun

1997, 02:30 minutes, colur/B&W

Territory

1997, 03:00 minutes, colour

Critical Writing

(untitled)
by Sally McKay and Harold Alegria Ortiz. The Bank of Symbiosis: An Archaeological Intervention, 1998. Toronto: The Symbiosis Collective, 1998.