Gil McElroy

A military brat, Gil McElroy was born in Metz, France in 1956 and grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English Literature at QueenÕs University in Kingston, Ontario. He has published poetry in Canadian, U.S. and Australian periodicals and been included in a number of anthologies. His first book-length collection of poetry, Dream Pool Essays, was published by Talonbooks in the fall of 2001 and short listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

His critical writing on art has been published in magazines in Canada, the U.S., and Australia. A collection of his essays and articles entitled Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art, was published in 2001 by Gaspereau Press. He has worked as an independent curator since the 1980s, organizing exhibitions for galleries in Ontario and the Maritimes. From 1997 to 2000, he was Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum in Charlottetown, PEI. He won the Christina Sabat Award for Art Criticism in 2001 for his exhibition catalogue essay on the visual poetry of bpNichol, "Ground States: The Visual Contexts of bpNichol."Ê He is also an artist, exhibiting gallery and site-specific installations based on his interests in cosmology. He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.

Awards
Christina Sabat Award for Art Criticism, 2001.
Short list, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2002.

 

Selected Publications
NonZero Definitions (Talonbooks, 2004) ISBN 0-88922-499-4.
Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001) ISBN 0-88922-454-4.
Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) ISBN 1-894031-46-4.
Some Julian Days (above/ground press, 1999) ISBN 1-894214-07-2.

 

Selected Anthologies
Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press,1998) ISBN 1-895837-37-5.
Side/lines: A Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2002).
Ê CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002) ISBN 0-921870-94-9.

 

Books in Print
McElroy, Gil