Liss Platt

Trail Blaze: Coming Home

February 10 – April 14, 2022

Multi-media artist, Liss Platt, creates artworks through an integrative approach utilizing video, film, photography, installation, performance, sculpture, web art, and printmaking disciplines. Through a combination of personal narrative, critical analysis, gender politics, and strategies of appropriation, Platt’s work examines how various representations and discourses shape an understanding of ourselves within the world.

Her Trail Blaze series of photography works was informed by a fortuitous discovery of hundreds of matchbooks given to her by a friend whose father had devoutly collected them on business trips in the ’60s and ’70s. In her own words:

I am interested in the romance and nostalgia that accompanies the notion of the traveling salesman and the potential stories and affect that can be harnessed through these once commonplace objects…The matchbook is a symbol of both a particular way of moving through the landscape and an attitude towards it: rather than leaving a flag at each summit, the salesman pockets a matchbook.

Trail Blaze: Coming Home features select prints from this ongoing series: pigment prints inspired by a biographical archive of travel returning back home to the origin of their production in Smokestack’s Digital Studio.

Platt’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions across Canada and the United States. Select solo-exhibitions include presentations at McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton ON; MKG127, Toronto ON; Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catherines ON; and Stride Gallery in Calgary AB.  Her performance and film/video works have been featured at Struts Gallery, Sackville NB and Documenta Madrid respectively. Platt has received several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council, and in 2012 was awarded a career achievement award in visual arts from the City of Hamilton.

In addition to her independent artistic practice, Platt is a Professor of Media Arts at McMaster University and a co-founder and member of Hamilton based queer art collective, Shake-n-Make, with Claudia B. Manley.

Artist Instagram
Artist Website

  • Silkscreening Liss Platt's "Hot Oven Grinders" special limited-edition print

    In tandem with the opening of Liss Platt’s solo-exhibition, ‘Trail Blaze: Coming Home‘, s special limited-edition print was produced in the Smokestack Analog studio. The final result, Hot Oven Grinders, was created by a 7-layer silkscreen process as demonstrated in the video below by master printmaker Laine Groeneweg.

  • "Hot Oven Grinders" in production: striker application

    Liss Platt in the Smokestack Analog Studio -

    Liss Platt’s uniquely created “Hot Oven Grinders” graphic involved an intricate and laborious process of hand-applying each individual striker of the design that was translated into a 2-dimensional print and 3-dimensional, life-sized matchbook.