Bill Vazan
(1933–)
Bill Vazan
1933–
Bill Vazan (1933– ), born William Vazan, is a Canadian conceptual land artist. His work takes the form of land art installations, stone sculptures, painting, video, and photomontages of cultural and historical sites around the globe. His practice explores the connections between humanity and the cosmos and challenges standard perceptions of space and time.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Vazan studied at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, and the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, before he moved to Montreal in 1957. He obtained a BFA from Sir George Williams University, Montreal, in 1970. Vazan has been deeply involved in the art community in Montreal, he participated in exhibitions, helped establish artist-run centres, and taught sculpture at the Université de Quebec à Montréal from 1981 to 2010.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Vazan’s land art was largely ephemeral and only survives in documentation such as photographs, videos, and books. The photographic documentation of his land works, often presented in a grid, illustrate Vazan’s exploration of the manipulation of space and time. His projects investigate cosmological models and disrupt society’s systems of understanding the universe, such as measurement. Vazan’s stone engravings signal the non-permeance of our existence, and his reworked maps and other documents highlight the abstract ways that territory and power are constructed. Overall, Vazan is concerned with making the invisible visible.
His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in exhibitions such as Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, a travelling group exhibition on view from 2010 to 2012, and Cosmological Shadows, a traveling retrospective on view from 2001 to 2005. His work is held in a number of significant museum collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, among others. Vazan was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2016 and the Paul Émilie Borduas prize for art and design from the province of Quebec in 2010. He is also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.