Blake Senini
Blake Senini is a Calgary sculptor and installation artist well-known to the regional and national art community. After two years of study at Malaspina College, Nanaimo, he earned a BFA (Honours) in Sculpture from the University of Victoria in 1975, followed by an MFA (Sculpture) from the University of Calgary in 1981. Until 2016 he was also a sculpture instructor at ACAD.
Senini has always been interested in exploring light, its characteristics and its interaction with particular forms. In the early 2000s he became intrigued with the role of light in the production of film: the repetition of movement and light to create movement and narrative. His exhibit, A Foreign Film (Skew Gallery, Calgary, 2005), comprised six large-scale, wall-mounted installations based on random shapes, resembling ink blots, and built up into laminated wood layers. Illuminated with angled light to create the illusion of transparency and movement, the pieces may be seen to form a narrative. In the same way he watches foreign films without sound or subtitles, creating his own version of the events, Senini hopes viewers will bring their own interpretation and create their own stories. The deliberately ambiguous shapes have been seen variously as landscapes, organic forms or wings. The silvered shapes in We Are All in the Same Air (Skew, 2009) have suggested sea shells.
Senini is also interested in the found, the overlooked, and the things that refuse to be forgotten. Stolen Birds and Many Doubts consisted of carved plywood shapes inspired by a yellowed newspaper cutting of a photo that kept resurfacing. Night Watch was based on spider trails left (or “carved”) overnight in the sawdust of his studio. Senini documented and enlarged the trails, first tracing the patterns onto paper templates, then cutting them onto ½-inch steel. The “jittery” outlines were then mounted on the wall and illuminated. Both series were shown as This History Haunts Me, at Skew Gallery, Calgary, in 2013.
In 2011, Blake won the City of Medicine Hat and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Commission for an Outdoor Public Sculpture. “Turn, Turn, Turn (A Resting Place)” features cast aluminium wings in a pyramidal shape, surrounded by a polished black cement circular base for seating. The piece is installed at The Esplanade.
Blake’s work appears in the permanent collections of the University of Victoria and the Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, the Canada Council Art Bank, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, the Governor General of Canada Art Collection, Rideau Hall, Ottawa; and in the Hyatt Regency Hotel Group Miami, FL and Beijing, China.
