Tom Benner: Call of the Wild

Tom Benner, the creator of the popular metal moose sculpture at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, has his larger than life works featured in a new exhibition.

The Tom Benner: Call of the Wild exhibit opened February 13 and runs to May 2 and will take up the entire top floor of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

London, Ontario’s Tom Benner has been a practicing artist since the early 1970s and since that time has exhibited his work widely across Canada and in the United States. By the early 1980s, he turned his artistic attentions to the relationship between human beings and nature and has continued to involve a sustained exploration of the environment, of history and of the land.

His sculptural works are often large scale creations fabricated from metal, fibreglass, leather, wood, paper and found objects. Benner’s cross-disciplinary approach to his work makes use of drawing, painting, printmaking, installation and sculpture. Visitors may recall seeing two of Benner’s works from the gallery’s collection: Moose, his 1999 sculpture located in the sculpture court, and Pod of Walrus (c.1990).

Extermination is a central theme within many of Benner’s homage works including his watershed work Hanging Fin (Whale) (1983) and more recently Orca (2006) and Shrines (2008-09). Many works also explore the histories of Aboriginal peoples in North America.

Tom Benner: Call of the Wild is curated by Melanie Townsend and circulated by Museum London.

above image: The Landscape, (detail), 2006, copper and wood, 365 x 265 x 426 cm. Courtesy of the artist.