Dana Buzzee

Art

Visiting Professor of Practice

Email

dbuzzee@smu.edu

Dana Buzzee is a visual artist and arts educator from Alberta, located on Treaty 7 land. Rooted in queer hauntology and materialism, Buzzee approaches their work as a narrative medium for speculative futurity. By shifting ubiquitous industrially-produced materials, particularly plastics, out of their conventional context in the built environment, Buzzee’s work questions our perception of these materials as neutral and leverages their long temporal reach to connect disparate timelines. Through critically exploring consumer fetishism's ties to extractive capitalist economies, particularly within counterculture communities, Buzzee’s sculpture-based installations gesture at fantasy, desire and notions of utopia.

Buzzee holds a B.F.A. from the Alberta College of Art and Design (Calgary, AB, 2012) and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR, 2022). Recent residencies that Buzzee has participated in include the Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA, 2024), The Banff Centre (Banff, AB, 2021) and the Icelandic Textile Center (Blondous, 2019). Their exhibition record includes shows at Orchid Contemporary (Hamilton, ON, 2023), HOT*BED (Philadelphia, PA, 2022), Ditch Contemporary (Springfield, OR, 2022), Eugene Contemporary (Eugene, OR, 2021), The Plumb (Toronto, ON, 2021), Harcourt House (Edmonton, AB, 2019) and Stride Gallery (Calgary, AB, 2018). Additionally, Buzzee's practice has received support through grants from the Calgary Arts Development Authority, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

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