Kent Tate creates artworks that represent various separate, yet coexisting worlds. Kent has been exhibited internationally at film and new media festivals, symposiums, juried screenings/exhibitions, and solo gallery installations. He has received grants, awards and residencies for his projects from the Banff Centre, the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, BC Arts Council, Hawaii State Arts Foundation, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. He is currently working on a number of new movies while preparing material for prints, video - sculptural installations and a tour.
Born in Rivers, Manitoba, Kent spent most of his childhood in Germany and Ottawa. At the age of 14 his father died and two years later Kent moved to the United States with his Mother where he attended the University of Utah studying painting and film. At that time he visited Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake which inspired him to focus his energies on issues regarding the Earth itself. Werner Herzog, and James Turrell also ignited his imagination as did the writings of Michel Foucault. Kent moved to Toronto after returning to Canada in 1980 and began an active period of exhibiting paintings, performance art, installations, films, and music. Kent's career has included a broad spectrum of styles and media, and in 1982 he created his Super 8 epic,"Vanishing Heat" During the tour of "Vanishing Heat" the only print was stolen in Seattle.
Kent then moved to Vancouver, where he continued to exhibit installations in Vancouver and Victoria throughout the 1980's. He adopted an Arte Povera sensibility to his work, using materials such as salt, sulfur, wax, copper, water, crude oil, house dust and electricity in his installations and other projects from 1982 to 1990. In 1992 Kent visited the island of Hawaii, motivating him to move to a house in a native Ohia rainforest near Volcano Village, just outside of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Here he found a place that displayed the essential forces of earth, air, fire and water. The basic elements that makes our very appearance possible. This had quite a profound impact on him, experiencing these elemental forces displayed so evocatively. Occasionally he would even see new land suddenly appear which only moments before none existed. It was in Hawaii where Kent began focusing his energies primarily through the lens of a digital camera.
In 2005 Kent returned to Canada settling in rural Saskatchewan where he resides today. Since then he has been re-discovering and exploring the interplay of sunlight and shadows in the country of his birth. For him the story is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. His new work, shown primarily as single channel movies or as gallery installations gravitate towards that which reveals the many layers of time, as well as describing our current circumstances. With his art he imagines worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to be.