Derek Liddington
Canada
Liddington (1981) lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. Liddington acknowledges his relationship to the land as shaped by his settler ancestry as a third generation Canadian. After obtaining his BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he focused on video and performance, Liddington completed an MFA at Western University, graduating in 2007. Liddington’s work holds a continuous interest in cultural memory and its iterations through abstraction, representation and modernist forms of visual language.
He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council. Most recently Liddington received the Canada Council creation grant for his project “The trees weep, The mountains still, the bodies rust” presented by the Musée d'art de Joliette. This exhibition is a touring project, having been exhibited at the Richmond Art Gallery (2022/23) and upcoming at Contemporary Calgary (2024). Liddington’s work has been shown internationally, including performances in Athens, Greece and Onagawa, Japan, and select exhibitions of his painting/installation work in Toronto (AGO), Madrid (ARCO), Berlin (Art Berlin Contemporary), and New York (Frieze Art Fair, NADA).
Liddington has had recent solo presentations at Cambridge Galleries (Ontario, Canada), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, Alberta), AKA Artist Run Center (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), and the Art Gallery of York University (Ontario, Canada). Liddington has had multiple publications on his work, most recently a catalogue published jointly by the SAAG and AGYU with texts by Emelie Chhangur. A central part of Liddington’s practice is his use of residencies as a means of developing ideas of space and place. These include residencies at the AGYU (Toronto, ON), AKA artist-run (Saskatoon, SK) and Onagawa AIR (Japan). In 2022/23 he participated in a year long research residency at the AGNES Etherington Art Centre spending time observing and listening to the museums collection of contemporary painting.
