This book features photographic documentation of fifty-three sculptures that each represents one piece of a chopped butternut squash. The carved plaster sculptures derived from an experimental video in which I accidentally chopped off the tip of my finger while preparing a butternut squash soup. This trajectory through materials from video to sculpture continued into photography and resulted in the photo-based artist book titled, One Butternut Squash, Chopped. Photographed within a controlled setting and consistent background, the subtle differences of each piece stand out, with the natural and organic curves of the squash in contrast with the sharp angles and straight edges created by the knife. The scale of this book when fully extended is nearly thirty feet long, turning an everyday object into something monumental and worthy of close inspection. The length of the book makes it unwieldy and therefore playful as an object that can be displayed sculpturally in various configurations.

More info: http://www.meredithsnider.ca

Meredith Snider is a multi-media artist from Fredericton, New Brunswick. Over the last thirteen years she has moved between Quebec, British Columbia, Ontario and New Brunswick, including a period of travel through Mexico and Central America. She currently resides in Gatineau, QC. Meredith has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a Specialization in Art Education from Concordia University (2005), and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa (2013). Her videos have been screened internationally at festivals in Turkey and Romania and this past summer she exhibited her thesis exhibition, titled Fruitless, at the Ottawa Art Gallery. In the fall of 2014 she will participate in a research and creation residency at Daïmõn, in Gatineau QC. As an artist Meredith works intuitively through different strands of research and various materials without knowing what the end product will look like. She moves between the media of drawing, sculpture, video, photography and installation, choosing to work with what best communicates her ideas. This process is an act of questioning that embraces uncertainty and frustration and allows for the people she works with, or the environment she works in, to have an effect on the artwork. This element of chance brings with it the unknown, the spontaneous, the unexpected and the irrational. By way of sincerity and humor, Meredith’s artistic practice seeks to examine gaps in common experience by critically approaching the spaces we move through, and by challenging the actions we conform to, whether political or emotional.