{"id":25,"date":"2017-06-09T15:05:46","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T19:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/?page_id=25"},"modified":"2026-01-22T16:31:55","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T21:31:55","slug":"about-the-artist","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/about-the-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"About the Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

MARLA PANKO<\/strong><\/span> was born in Toronto and grew up in Southern Ontario.\u00a0 \u00a0Upon the completion of a BFA from the University of Guelph and earning an MFA scholarship from the University of Windsor, Panko settled in Hamilton and now resides in Dundas, Ontario.\u00a0 She has been a working professional artist for over forty-five years exhibiting\u00a0 extensively throughout the region in both public and private galleries including solo exhibitions at The Art Gallery of Hamilton (1990), Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant (2009), and the Art Gallery of Burlington (2012) among others.\u00a0 She has been represented locally by Gallery on the Bay and the Carnegie Gallery and her work can be found in many private and public collections including\u00a0 the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Cambridge Galleries \/ Idea Exchange, Crown Life Inc., and the University of Windsor.\u00a0 \u00a0Her work has received numerous awards, and she was the recipient of a Hamilton Arts Council Creator Award in 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alongside her artistic practice, Panko has sustained a long and varied career in art education and arts administration.\u00a0 \u00a0After four years at the Art Gallery of Hamilton working in their Education Department, she was an instructor in the Visual Arts Department at Brock University for six years.\u00a0 She taught concurrently at the Burlington Arts Centre (AGB), and was a longtime member of the Dundas Valley School of Art faculty from 1984-2016.\u00a0 She also participated in the “Artist at the Centre Project’ for twelve years as a consultant and advocate for children’s creative thinking.\u00a0 She has been very involved in the arts community and volunteered as Director of the DVSA Gallery for many years.\u00a0 Panko has spoken widely on art and art education throughout the region.\u00a0 She held the position of Curator at the Carnegie Gallery from 2015-2023 and now serves on their Board of Directors.<\/span><\/p>\n

ABOUT THE WORK<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/span>Panko’s work examines the uncertainties of modernity.\u00a0 She explores themes of impermanence, memory, the passage of time, and shared culture.\u00a0 Visually rooted in geometric abstraction, her paintings incorporate a highly structured use of colour and composition as a means of organizing pictorial space.\u00a0 \u00a0The use of these formal elements balances the interplay of stillness and movement, flatness and dimension, simplicity and complexity.\u00a0 In some works, the additional integration of appropriated images or found materials further contributes to the underlying contextual narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n

“The work is<\/strong>\u00a0an effort to make visual sense of<\/strong> a <\/strong>complex world<\/strong> –\u00a0 <\/strong>how we understand the present, how<\/strong>\u00a0we remember the past, and how we anticipate the future.”\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

“My process is grounded in painting and collage \u2014 often interchangeable and frequently combined.\u00a0 As a painter, I value the pure non-representational interplay of formal elements, and carefully construct them to create an interdependent and unified whole.\u00a0 As a collage artist, l appreciate the spontaneous and intuitive connection with physical materials and papers.\u00a0 The use of found images and text can suggest more open-ended associations inviting a more poetic approach.\u00a0 I<\/span>ncorporating textiles, whether alone or in combination with other media,\u00a0 <\/span>introduces further possibilities to explore surface texture and transparency.\u00a0 \u00a0And the use of slow repetitive hand stitching encourages personal reflection giving form to an internal monologue.\u00a0 Sculptural\u00a0 pieces allow the work to realize a more tangible and physical form.\u00a0 Whatever medium I’m working in, there is an evolution of continual alteration,\u00a0 manipulation, and subtle layering that allows ideas to slowly emerge and become formalized. “<\/span><\/p>\n

“The challenge to achieve a unified elegance of meaning and form is unchanging.\u00a0 The work is less about the coexistence of fragments, than it is about creating a new poetic hybrid.<\/strong>”\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MARLA PANKO was born in Toronto and grew up in Southern Ontario.\u00a0 \u00a0Upon the completion of a BFA from the University of Guelph and earning an MFA scholarship from the University of Windsor, Panko settled in Hamilton and now resides in Dundas, Ontario.\u00a0 She has been a working professional artist for over forty-five years exhibiting\u00a0 … Continue reading About the Artist<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":567,"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions\/567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marlapanko.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}