Tom Benner
Thomas Earl Benner, known as Tom Benner (born 1950), is a Canadian sculptor of large sculptures and installations exploring the environment, history and nature. His work has been widely exhibited in Canada in public galleries and even in unconventional places, such as Union Station in Toronto. He is associated with a movement in Canadian art known as London Regionalism, which took place in the city of London, Ontario, where he was born and lives. Biography. From 1970–1974, together with Murray Favro and others, Benner was a member of a group of young artists working as sculptors centred around  Don Bonham and known as The Herman Goode Aesthetic Racing Team (The A.R.T.). Theirs was an art of invention, a way to make the viewer consider the work of art as a part of the world around them. Benner took from the group a conviction about what constitutes an art object and the manner of its presentation. In time, his work would transform history itself into an imagined landscape. Benner's first shows concerned nature's products such as leaves and fibreglass sculptures of rocks and boulders. In 1977, Sir George Williams Art Galleries in Montreal hosted an exhibition of  works by Benner and his artist brother, Ron Benner. In 1983, he created his first environmentally-oriented work, "Hanging Fin (Whale)". For this installation, he created a hanging whale made of metal and hardware, which he suspended from the ceiling by rope. He set on the wall behind the hanging whale a painting of the whale mother and baby. It was the first of his installations dedicated to memory and loss, a signature work that marked the beginning of his prolific production of memorial sculptures to endangered and extinct wildlife. He created it in response to his feeling that there  was a lack of animal symbolism in Western culture so, as an artist, as he said, it was his job to put that in. In 1986, the exhibition, titled "A Response", consisted of large-scale sculptures and linocut prints that depicted threatened or extinct wildlife, such as the fin whale, polar bear, sea eagle, puma, white rhinoceros and the great auk. It embodied extensive research on Benner's part about the meanings of animals and nature symbols to older civilizations. A particular highlight was the surreal installation of "White Rhino" (1986), a full-scale aluminum-clad sculpture of a rhinoceros . In 1996, in his show titled "Tecumseh", at Museum London, Benner also brought to light little known or lost histories of Aboriginal identities in the Canadian narrative, such as "Tribute to Nahneebahweequay" (1988) and "Tecumseh" (1993). In 1997, he exhibited his full-size 600-pound copper "Bison" in Union Station in Toronto and then toured it in 1998 in his show, "Tour of Bison". In 2002, Catherine Elliot Shaw for the McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario, curated "Cruising the Margins", Benner's "auto" show, composed of three full-size classic cars made by Benner which travelled to nine galleries across  Canada and the United States. That same year, Benner began an eight-foot in diameter, 13-foot-high sphere "Moon". He wanted to build pieces that were sculpture in simple, dramatic forms in the medium of copper. The "Moon" became the core for "A Landscape", a show in 2008. He added the "Red Pine" and the "Coyote", resulting in a work that reflected the landscape paintings he grew up with, represented by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, and those made by his friends Roly Fenwick and Paterson Ewen. In 2010, Museum London held a major travelling retrospective exhibition  of 20 years of his work, "Call of the Wild" which travelled to eight galleries across Canada. Some viewers thought the show seemed like the remnants of a storybook world but even museum professionals found its scale, which required major gallery space, "quite impressive". In 2016, the Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Ontario, showed his exhibition "Ice Formations" with a monumental sculpture, watercolours and what Benner calls "cased shrines" honouring marine animals. Public collections. Benner also has permanent installations of outdoor sculpture including the "White Rhino" at Museum London, "Rookery of Herons" at Norfolk Arts Centre (Simcoe), "The Ancient Ones  at the Woodstock Art Gallery and Turkey Vultures" at the D.B. Weldon Library, Western University, London, Ontario.