Italian-Canadian artist Christopher Webb explores the tension between inheritance and erasure, examining how migration, commerce, and identity are carried across generations. Rooted in personal history, his work navigates assimilation, loss of culture, and it’s quiet transformation through necessity and survival.
Working primarily in oil painting, Webb employs a restrained and meticulous visual language, depicting everyday subjects—often cropped or isolated—to create images that feel both intimate and distant, familiar yet unknowable. Drawing from personal experience and archival material, his motifs—shipping containers, fragments of handwritten text, vessels in transit—become carriers of memory, shaped by absence, displacement, and inherited narratives.
While painting remains central, Webb’s practice extends fluidly into installation, sound, and performance. These expanded forms allow him to construct immersive environments where memory is not only represented, but physically and sensorially encountered—activating space, voice, and material as extensions of his conceptual concerns.
Webb’s work ultimately questions what is preserved and what is lost. It considers the invisible weight of names, the silences within family histories, and the shifting terrain between belonging and estrangement. Through a language that moves between image and experience, his practice reflects on how identity is continuously assembled—across time, geography, and memory.
Christopher Webb is a self-taught visual artist who lives and works in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the recipient of the Arts Nova Scotia Established Artist Recognition Award 2025 and the No Title Gallery Venezia Prize for Painting 2024. He will have his first international solo exhibition in Venice in November of 2026 at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo.
Webb has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including: Contained - Dalhousie University School of Architecture, Halifax, Canada (2024/solo), Dys(U)topia - CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venezia, Venice, Italy (2024/group), Dominus Vobiscum - PAVIA Gallery, Nova Scotia, Canada (2022/Solo), Air Land 4.0: Nature, Technology, Energy - Turin, Italy (2022/Group), Nova Scotia Art Bank Exhibition - Anna Leonowens Gallery / NSCAD University, Nova Scotia, Canada (2022/Group), Alone - Acadia University Art Gallery - Nova Scotia, Canada (2021/Group), and Terroir - A Nova Scotia Survey - Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada (2016/Group). His work has been placed in various public collections including: Comune di Valenzano (Bari, Italy), The Nova Scotia Art Bank (Nova Scotia, Canada), Province House (Nova Scotia, Canada), and Saint Mary's University (Nova Scotia, Canada). He has been an Artist-in-Residence in Canada and Europe including ARCAC (Annapolis Royal, Canada) and with Quasi Quadro (Torino, Italy).
Webb frequently guest lectures at universities and art colleges and is also the co-founder and director of PAVIA Gallery where he has curated exhibitions and directed Artist-in-Residence programs involving national and international artists.
Curriculum Vitae
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