Gary Lee-Nova

Gary Lee-Nova (June 26, 1943), born Gary Nairn,

Biography Lee-Nova was born in Toronto, Ontario; his father was an air force bombardier and navigator, his mother was a teacher.

In his early art career, Lee-Nova spent 15 months in England as a student at Coventry College (1961–1962) and was introduced by his fellow students and teachers to a wider vision of art-making than was available at art school in Canada at the time.

As an adolescent and young adult, Lee-Nova had several hero figures, both writers: the American William S. Burroughs, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan. He has studied, collected, and corresponded with Burroughs, and sometimes also carried Burroughsian thinking in new directions in his art-making, Lee-Nova has said. He started making films in 1965 and produced Steel Mushrooms in 1967 in collaboration with Dallas Selman.

In Vancouver, he was a co-founder of the Image Bank (with Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov) and active in the Sound Gallery (circa 1965) and Intermedia (1967–1972). He also worked with the spectrum as a motif and thereby began the Image Bank's Colour Bar Research project. The mask was created with the assistance of artist Kate Craig.

Lee-Nova continued to be a key figure on the West Coast Scene in the early 1970s, working with electronic media and film as well as painting and printmaking. Lee-Nova said about the work: "The work is an expression of an aspect of the nature of language. I regard a system of measurement as a language system.

Lee-Nova's work has been exhibited at galleries such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, Bau-Xi Gallery (Toronto), University of Saskatchewan, the Western Front, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Burnaby Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the Demarco Gallery (Edinburgh) and the Paris Biennale. His papers are in the Gary Lee-Nova Fonds, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver.

He has been a teacher at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Chairperson Interdisciplinary Studies Division (1984–1988), lecturer in linguistics, semiotics and media history for 7 years and an instructor in Drawing and Computer Applications for about 25 years (retired 2008). In 2018 he received the title Professor Emeritus.

Selected public collections Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston Vancouver Art Gallery