Prof. Troy Hourie, an award-winning stage scenographer and installation artist, was featured in an Aug. 9 article in the Wall Street Journal.
Hourie, who recently joined the School of English and Theatre Studies, is a Métis artist and comes to U of G with a broad range of expertise in design and performance from working for almost 15 years in New York City, where he designed more than 300 plays, musicals and operas.
The Wall Street Journal praised Hourie’s design work on “Pushkin: A Life Played Out”, currently on stage at Manhattan’s Sheen Centre for Thought and Culture. It said Hourie’s design was simple, but still managed to capture “the resplendent air” of Czarist Russia.
His opera and theatre credits include The Glimmerglass Festival, The New Victory, New York Theatre Workshop, Cherry Lane Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Classical Theatre of Harlem, The Guthrie, Bay Street Theatre, Williamstown, Huntington Theatre, Jupiter Maltz Theatre, Sarasota Opera, Nashville Opera, Austin Lyric Opera and Virginia Opera.
As a visual artist, Hourie focuses on themes of wonder, spectatorship, immersion and intermediality, and he is interested in exploring the relationship of an audience to performative work.
This fall, Hourie will open his first major exhibition in Canada called Apparitions at the Aurora Cultural Centre, Oct. 6-Nov. 10. Apparitions is an immersive, mixed-media installation composed of The Bed, The Attic and The Writing Cabinet. This interactive artwork examines the idea of designing for wonder by exploring the esoteric nature of Britten’s opera Turn of the Screw. In residence at the Art Gallery of Guelph, Hourie will be working on a long-term performative art installation called Freaks.