“I started life as Jeffrey Robert Stonehouse before being adopted at six days of age. As a consequence, considerations of identity, history and spirituality have long been my preoccupation and the driving force behind my art. Much of my work explores historical and contemporary culture through the use of humour, stereotypes, traits and artifacts. As a man with an unspecified cultural heritage, I feel some latitude to stake a tentative, probing claim, if not to a specific cultural group, then to a generalized Canadian past. My practice focuses on encaustic painting and assemblage, which I build from objects and materials that I’ve collected, scavenged and sometimes aged. The worn, the broken, the lost
and the found draw into focus a time very different from our own. As artifacts of another era, they are witnesses to the people, the travails and the injustices that much of my work addresses.”