Christopher Webb explores the tension between inheritance and erasure, examining how migration, commerce, and identity are intertwined across generations. His practice is deeply rooted in personal history — navigating the complexities of assimilation, loss of language, and the transformation of culture and identity through necessity and survival.
Through a meticulous and restrained visual language, Webb renders everyday scenes and objects — sometimes cropped, often isolated — creating images that feel at once intimate and distant, familiar and unknowable. His works, often inspired by personal events and archival photographs, elevate the overlooked and mundane: shipping containers, fragment of handwritten text, vessels lost in transit. These motifs are layered with prose, memory, and the weight of inherited narratives, transforming them into artifacts of adaptation and longing.
In recent years, Webb’s focus has shifted to the movement of goods as a metaphor. His paintings of cargo ships and containers reflect not only on trade and globalization but on the personal displacement embedded in these systems — the ways in which migration reshapes identity, how cultural memory is commodified, and how the pursuit of a "better life" often comes at the cost of losing something essential.
Webb’s work questions what we carry forward and what we leave behind. It speaks to the invisible weight of names, the stories that are silenced, and the fractured spaces between belonging and estrangement. His paintings thrive on the tension between utility and disposability, history and reinvention, challenging the viewer to reconsider the intersections of migration, economy, and identity — not just in the world at large, but in the deeply personal landscapes of family and self.
Christopher Webb is a self-taught, visual artist who lives in works in Nova Scotia, Canada. He was awarded the CREA - Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venezia Prize for Painting and will have his first international solo exhibition in 2025 at the Marina Bastianello Gallery in Venice, Italy.
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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