Alex McKay, BFA Hon. (U. Windsor), MFA (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) was born in Detroit, MI and raised in Windsor, Ontario. He is a dual national (USA & Canada) of English and Scottish extraction. His interests lie in issues of Landscape, Place and Identity. He has an extensive body of work exploring the fraught relationship between First Nations and the dominant Settler Culture of Canada and the USA. The Claude mirror work, a collaboration with Suzanne Matheson, is a continuation of this exploration, albeit in a less direct manner.

He is currently the Visual Arts Editor for the Windsor Review, A Quarterly Art and Literary Journal through the Department of English, University of Windsor (and is always looking for interesting submissions). He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Windsor and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. The courses have included Studio Fundamentals/Foundations, Photography and Visual Narrative. He has conducted a workshop for High School teachers at the Yale British Art Center on making and using simple and inexpensive Camera Obscura and Camera Lucida in the classroom. He has held Research Fellowships from the Yale Center for British Art, the Inaugural Smith Fellowship for Independent Scholars from the Canadian Society for 18th Century Studies, the Humanities Research Group (University of Windsor), as well as invitations to speak at universities and conferences such as the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of Saskatoon, and the 2008 NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) conference. In addition the BBC has created a webpage devoted to our project, our Tintern Claude mirror was used in a BBC TV production, we have loaned Claude mirrors to three BBC TV production crews, and we were interviewed on the CBC’s Sounds Like Canada radio programme (now archived to a podcast). As well our website is linked to various other visual culture (Max Plancx Institute, Berlin) and literature websites (Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly). He has received grants from SSHRC, OAC, Cadw - the Welsh Government and corporate sponsorship from iQinvision of California, the Tintern Abbey Abbey Hotel in Wales, as well as small honourariums attached to the various fellowships and corporate sponsorships. A complete list connected to the Claude mirror project can be found in the Acknowledgments page, whilst other grants and sponsorship  can be found in his full CV. He has exhibited in Windsor, Chatham, St. Catherines, Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Montreal, Thunder Bay, Wales, Belgium and Milan.

Projects, 1988-1999, Claude mirror projects

CV Last Updated 13 September 2011