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Rebecca Anweiler (born 1959) is a contemporary Canadian visual artist based in Kingston, Ontario. She has been exhibiting works in oil painting, new media and video since 2000. She has taught at Queen’s University for 15 years. Most notably her works are in the collections of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the City of Toronto, and the University of Lethbridge.

Early Life and Education
Anweiler was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1959.

Anweiler attended the University of Guelph for a Bachelor’s of Science. Studying biology, she did not originally study painting, but topics of biology, gender and sexuality that stem from this degree are common themes in her artistic practice.

Anweiler then moved to Toronto to attend the University of Toronto. She then received a Master of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 1994. Anweiler then attended the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), where she received an Associates Degree in drawing and painting in 1997.

Specializing in painting, she later attended Concordia University in 2000 for her Masters of Fine Art. While attending Anweiler was awarded J. W. McConnell Memorial Fellowship.

Notable Exhibitions
One of Anweiler’s first exhibitions after completing her MFA at Concordia was Longing for Paradise at the Toronto based BUSgallery in 2000. This two-person show was alongside Guelph-based painter Pearl Van Geest. Their work both focused on topics of what is considered public and private as well as the subject of traditional femininity.

Shown initially at Maison de la Culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montréal, Québec, Sexual/Nature (later shown under the title Nature Lover at the Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects) depicts a range of found photography of animals in nature from National Geographic magazines, lesbian pornography from On Our Backs, the first woman run pornographic magazine, and film stills from notable Hollywood movies during the Hays Code era. These images were cropped, combined, and reproduced as paintings in the series. The juxtaposition of these images is done to emphasize how sexuality is constructed and idealized through symbolism in common imagery.

Manifestations of a Different Nature is one of three exhibitions Anweiler has had displayed in the David Kaye Gallery in Toronto. Debuting in 2008, this collection emphasizes many reoccuring themes in Anweiler’s artistic practice such as the connections between science and mysticism, as well as the conflict between nature and modernity. More recent exhibitions that have displayed at the David Kaye Gallery are I Wish You Were Here in 2012 and Passing Through in 2017.

Anweiler participated in Art Shift at the Union Gallery in Kingston, Ontario. Located on the Queen’s University campus, the Union Gallery is student-centred and aims to support the education of young artists. Art Shift was a 2009 project that brought together artists from different generations, both emerging and established artists, who would work together in a creative exchange while providing professional development to participants. The exhibition “Conflux” happened at the end of the Art Shift project and was in the Union Gallery’s main space. The show featured one of  Anweiler’s paintings entitled “Storm Bird II,” from Anweiler’s earlier exhibition Manifestations of a Different Nature.

In 2017 Anweiler held a solo show at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston, Ontario titled Animal/Séance. The show explored animal intelligence, telepathic communication and spirituality through a photo installation, a video work and an interactive computer program in Modern Fuel’s State of Flux gallery, which is a space designed for locally-based emerging or mid-career artists to show their work. This show contained an “experiment,” in which participants were instructed to make a connection with a photo of an animal in the photo installation and then engage with the interactive computer program. This experiment led participants to spiritually connect with one of the animals, which were deceased pets from the Kingston area, and then measure their connection objectively through the program’s database of information about each pet. The goal of the experiment was to observe whether participants truly did communicate with the spirits of the deceased animals by how much information they knew about the animal.

= Group Exhibitions =

Artistic Practice and Influences
Much of Anweiler’s work is done in a photo-realistic style deriving source imagery from encyclopedias and textbooks produced through the 1950s. Many of her earlier works are grisailles. Anweiler’s style emphasizes the inherent symbolism in everyday imagery through the reproduction of these images. Through reproduction Anweiler calls attention to how social norms of the past continue to be recreated in the present.

Anweiler’s background in science and education are key influences in her artistic practice. Anweiler uses her artistic practice as a form of critique for Western science and colonialism, calling into question how inflexible mainstream scientific institutions are in terms of inexplicable phenomena often attributed to the supernatural. Anweiler holds these themes in relation to her concerns around climate change. As seen in Anweiler’s exhibition I Wish You Were Here, wherein Anweiler painted a series of picturesque Canadian landscapes, she critically omits the infrastructure of the resource extraction industry which characterize many of those scenes today.

Anweiler’s work also seeks to investigate how understandings of human sexuality and sexual orientation emerge in scientific discourses around biological determinism and the natural world. Anweiler calls to attention how sexism, racism, and heteronormativity simultaneously structure the production of scientific knowledge around human biology and social mores around sex. Seen in the exhibition Sexual/Nature, Anweiler interrogates how the “normal” is constructed for sexuality. Specifically selecting images from educational sources, Anweiler’s work observes that images of the “natural” or “normal” are highly constructed to convey specific meanings around what is acceptable, such as the nuclear family, and what is made to be taboo, such as homosexuality.