Risa Horowitz has lived and worked in seven Canadian provinces as an artist, educator, writer, and gallery programmer. Her work has been exhibited across Canada in a variety of public galleries and artist-run-centres, as well as internationally in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. She is represented in Toronto by MKG127 Gallery. Horowitz has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, several provincial funding bodies, the K.M. Hunter award for excellence in Visual Arts in 2006, as well as the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her research in visual arts and practice-based scholarship.
This year, the Saskatchewan Arts Board acquired a 2012 photograph from the Imaging Saturn project, and DFAIT purchase 20 Trees of Canada paintings now on permanent display at Canada House, the High Commission at Trafalgar Square, London. Horowitz joined the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina in 2011, where she is now associate professor.
Horowitz’s extended practice is contextualized by conceptualism and an interest in how visual and information systems define knowledge. Many of her works are motivated by questions having to do with space, time, and being as these are experienced through making and expressed visually through art. Her recent scholarly research stems from a sense of advocacy for the creative spaces that artists occupy towards the production of forms of knowledge that are uniquely visual. Responding to the disciplining of art practice through its ongoing entrenchment within university structures, her art practice tends toward blurring the boundaries between expert-amateur, hobby-work, and leisure-productivity.