Cold Comfort

Gil McElroyGilbert McElroy, who goes by the name of Gil, was born in 1956 in Metz, France, as the eldest of four children. He grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. As a result of air force relocations, he spent his childhood in Metz, France (1956-1957), Chatham, New Brunswick and St. Margaret's, New Brunswick (1957-1961), Beaverbank, Nova Scotia (1961-1963), Tacoma, Washington (1963-1967), Windsor (1967), and North Bay, Ontario (1967-1975). He then studied English literature at Queen's University in Ontario.McElroy's poems and critical writing have been published in countless periodicals throughout North America since the late 1970s; issued in a number of self-published chapbooks, broadsheets, and one-of-a-kind book works; and anthologized in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2003), and Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1999).McElroy has also worked as an independent curator and freelance art critic for 20 years, organizing exhibitions for public art galleries and museums in Canada and writing art criticism for magazines in Canada, the United States, and Australia. A selection of his catalog essays and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and in the anthology CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002). His show St. Art: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol pays tribute to one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Originally mounted at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in May through October, 2000, St. Art later moved to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before touring Canada throughout 2001. McElroy's curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition also won the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts.McElroy is currently working on a social and cultural history of the electronic line of defense that was the Pinetree Line.He lives in Colborne, Ontario, with his wife, Heather.Awards and RecognitionGerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry Nominee (2002) Dream Pool EssaysChristina Sabat Award for Art Criticism (2001) Ground States: The Visual Contexts of bpNichol