Biography
David MacWilliam is an artist living in Vancouver, Canada.
He has been active in the Vancouver art community both as an artist and a teacher since 1980. Since 1987, he has been teaching painting and digital visual arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, in Vancouver, Canada, where he is currently the Academic Dean.
His work has been exhibited extensively in Canada and occasionally in Europe over the past 30 years. Some of these exhibitions include the Paris Biennale (1982), Vancouver Art Gallery's Art and Artists 1939-83 (1983), and most recently in the VAG's PAINT exhibition (2006/07). He had one person exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1984), and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1990) and the Galleria Panorama, Barcelona (1997), the Musee Regional de Rimouski in Quebec (1998) and Winchester Galleries, Victoria (2006).
His current research includes ways of gathering and recording GIS: Geospatial Information Systems to create drawings, networks or social graphs and different strategies for presenting this information visually. He is particularly interested in making geospatial drawings, that use mobile, locative and mapping technologies.
He sees drawing and mapping as a prototype for collaboration and participation. He has also been making drawings that connect points to make simple polygons that represent networks. He is considering how we create create communities and how we arrive at our sense of place within the world.
Recently he as been exploring the aesthetic possibilities of lossy data compression to produce media objects. His aim is to capitalize on the loss of fidelity through heavy compression rate-distortion to record new compression artifacts and create new artworks.
