Eldon Garnet

1946–

Eldon Garnet (1946– ) is a contemporary Canadian artist, writer, and professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Based in Toronto since birth, Eldon earned his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from York University. From 1975 to 1990, Garnet served as the editor of ‘Impulse,’ an international magazine focused on art, fashion, and ideas. His body of work encompasses various artistic expressions that intentionally create an unsettling sense of ambiguity, which seems to be a recurring theme in his projects, often embodying the characteristics of a “contemporary gesamtkunstwerk that surpasses both the obvious narrative and the postmodern ironic.”

Garnet’s artworks have been widely shown in North America and Europe. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1985. One of his notable pieces, NO, 1997, was featured in the exhibition Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The National Gallery of Canada held a comprehensive retrospective of Garnet’s career in 1998 with The Fallen Body. In 2002, his photographs were shown at the Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie. In the same year, his work was part of an exhibition titled Dust at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.

As a writer, Garnet published his novel Lost Between the Edges, 2007, with Semiotext(e). As a sculptor, he collaborated with Francis LeBouthillier to create public sculptures in Downtown Toronto, including the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial, 1989, and the more recent Artifacts of Memory, 2016, commemorating Chinese railroad workers in Canada.