Sandra Smirle is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist whose work encompasses ideas around surveillance, dataveillance and our ‘viewer society’ — wherein fear for a loss of personal privacy articulates with perceptions of enhanced security. The increasingly public and participatory nature of surveillance in day-to-day contemporary culture is reshaping it, less as technology and more as a way of seeing. From the artist’s perspective, it can render the consumable controllable and the protective empowering.
Often using aerial maps as a starting point, Sandra explores how new technologies impact the way we view our world, and how we in turn are viewed by these mechanisms designed to navigate our movements. Her works suggest a survey of seeing and being seen.
Sandra Smirle’s work has been exhibited nationally and as well as internationally, and is contained in private and corporate collections in Canada, Australia and Europe. It is also featured in The Map as Art: Contemporary Artist Explore Cartography, published by Princeton Architectural Press. She completed her MFA at Concordia University and currently resides in Montréal, Canada.
photo credit: Elizabeth Littlejohn, 2019