Chris Temple lives and works in Toronto. His work captures precise architectural details while evoking, through light and colour, the psychological impact of being in a given space. He examines structures that vie for attention in the urban landscape, and later paints them with lyric realism.

Since the early 1980s, Chris Temple has been exploring the monumental aspects of urban landscape. Temple is fascinated by the way cities take shape and evolve over time. Temple manipulates the perspective of the streets and buildings, and in Ancestry (1998), he positions the viewer at street level. Depicting the acute perspective of the buildings, without people and only a sole car with the headlights shining at the viewer, the artist evokes the overwhelming sensation of alienation and dwarfism that we have all felt within a large city.