Chad Coombs is a Saskatoon-based multidisciplinary artist working across photography, collage, and painting.

His practice examines how identity, perception, and meaning are shaped through the conditions and relationships in which we exist. Rather than treating people, places, objects, or images as isolated subjects, Coombs is interested in the structures between them. The ways repetition and difference create distinction, how environments influence what occupies them, how memory reshapes experience, and how things change in response to the conditions surrounding them.

Across the practice, these questions take different material forms. Photography moves between direct encounters with the physical world and constructed images assembled through collage, intervention, and manipulation. Painting provides another space for investigating perception, form, and the relationship between individual elements and the larger structures they create.

The work often begins with something observed rather than something predetermined. A relationship, pattern, contradiction, or interruption can become the point from which a larger investigation develops. This allows the work to move between personal experience and external observation without requiring either to provide a fixed interpretation.

Coombs is less interested in resolving these questions than in creating conditions for them to remain active. The resulting work asks viewers to spend time with relationships that may be familiar, contradictory, or unresolved, and to bring their own experience into what the image leaves open.

His practice is informed by a sustained attentiveness to patterns, relationships, and the ways experience is organized and understood.