Shelley Miller is a Montreal-based artist who works in public spaces, creating both ephemeral street art installations, as well as permanent public art commissions. She has presented her work across Canada as well as India, Brazil and Australia. She earned a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the Alberta College of Art and Design (1997) and a Masters in Fine Arts from Concordia University (2001). She has received numerous fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Quebec and the Commonwealth Foundation.
Her work has been acquired by The City of Montreal, The Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (Salvador, Brazil), Reliance Industries (Mumbai, India), the Just for Laughs Museum (Montreal, QC) as well as many private collectors.
Artwork description
A grid of 50 squares by 50 squares, this mosaic represents 33 Montreal neighborhoods during the first 50 days of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020. Each column represents a day, starting April 1. Using Santé Montréal statistics, artist Shelley Miller worked in collaboration with pediatric infectious disease specialist Joanna Merckx. The data was recast to round cases / 1000 statistics in blocks of 2%. Using this method, the final model illustrates how each neighborhood compares to one another, not by total number of cases, but rather by comparing cases according to population density. Although overall numbers increased across the island, the fluctuations show how constant the comparative density of cases became after just 35 days.