Penner Bancroft is a Vancouver-based artist whose work explores connections between memory, history, and place. In the late 1970s she produced For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War, 1977, an extended portrait about her sister Susan and brother-in-law Dennis, who had been diagnosed with leukemia. Penner Bancroft developed an approach to photography that emphasized relationships and daily life. In works such as Mnemonicon (The Screen), 1988, and Shift, 1989, she introduced sculptural elements as a means of investigating gender, identity, and memory as situated concepts connected to place. She is professor emerita at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and in 2012 won the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.

Image: Marian Penner Bancroft, Mnemonicon (The Screen) (detail), 1988, silver gelatin prints on panel, 203 x 307.5 x 4.8 cm.

For further reading, see:

Arnold, Grant. Spiritlands: t/HERE: Marian Penner Bancroft. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012.

Langford, Martha. Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, 277–84. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.