AVIAN CYBORGS: The Art of Terry Graff

200 pages, full colour, 9.5 x 11 in.

ISBN: 978-1-927054-54-3 C$45.00 2023

Along with an extensive history of exhibitions and accomplishments as a visual artist, Terry Graff has had a distinguished career as an art educator, art writer, curator, and gallery director. He has served as executive director of four public art galleries in four different provinces of Canada: the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (NB), the Mendel Art Gallery (SK), Rodman Hall Arts Centre (ON), and Confederation Centre Art Gallery (PEI), as well as of the artist-run Struts Gallery in Sackville (NB). He has curated over two hundred exhibitions and authored numerous articles, catalogues, and books on both contemporary and historical art.

Since the early days of his artistic practice in the 1970s, Graff has been captivated by birds and fowl, which have become his primary iconography for exploring the evolving relationship of humans and human-created technology with the natural world. He combines bird forms with mechanical and human ones, creating grotesque hybrid dystopian worlds both darkly humorous and starkly serious in conveying their message of nature’s fight for survival against human intrusion and exploitation. Graff is tirelessly versatile in diverse mediums; his work includes mixed media sculpture, acrylics, assemblage, and collage.

AVIAN CYBORGS includes a foreword by Demetra Christakos with contributions by arts writer Bill Auchterlonie; curators Greg Davies, Marie E. Maltais, and Mary Reid; and art professor emeritus Virgil Hammock. Also featured is an extended interview with the artist conducted by St. Thomas University fine art students. 

“At once humorous and horrific, Graff’s most recent work, the Warbird series, continues his focus on hybridizations of nature and technology through the fusion of birds with war machinery and combat weaponry in a black comedy of nature fighting back for its very survival.” –Bill Auchterlonie

“Bird iconography continues to be my primary vehicle for expressing what it feels like to live in a time of crisis, of prevailing and pronounced fears and anxieties brought on by real life perils unfolding on the planet – climate change and ecological catastrophes, the trauma and brutal carnage of war, and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic. As human beings, we project our values and cultural assumptions onto the natural world. By exaggerating the anthropocentric way we see the nonhuman other by literally attaching castoff detritus and artefacts of human culture to various bird forms, I aim to underscore how we promote human interests at the expense of the wellbeing of other species.” 

–Terry Graff