John McEwen was born in Toronto in 1945. He currently lives and works in Hillsdale, Ontario. Co-founder and former director of A Space, John McEwen was honoured in 2007 with a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge, Alberta. He is recognised both internationally and across Canada for his many site-specific installations and public commissions. In 2019, he was a recipient of the Order of Canada. McEwen is best known for his inventive approach to ‘sculpting’ animals as vehicles of the imagination. Whether flame cut from a massive steel slab or composed of a skin of steel stars, these sculpted animals—quite often dogs or wolves—outline the critical ways we experience and think about the natural world. Of the two main approaches to figurative animals, the solid steel life-size silhouettes indicate the divide between us and them, but as the viewer moves and changes perspective the ‘animal’ quickens and begins to work within our imagination. However, when language threatens to conscript the ‘free’ spirit of that animal, McEwen often introduces other vehicles such as the canoe, boat or airplane to produce a mitigating effect. These vehicles and their given perspectives might then either replace or operate alongside the animal.In his second, more recent approach, animals made with a skin of small laser-cut stars demonstrate a more interactive cosmos, one with a freer range and less guarded dynamic. Within these three-dimensional bodies, difference becomes a reminder that all life exists – like folds in a garment, alike through embodiment but different through lifestyle.