Fire Season

×

Expand

Image courtesy of Art Gallery of Grande Prairie

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 19, 2025, 6 - 8 pm, Art Gallery of Grande Prairie

Free admission. Open to the public.

Fire Season brings together the work of two artists, Robert Guest and Megan Green, reflecting on wildfires as both natural events and urgent symbols of climate change.

Robert Guest (1938–2017), a longtime resident of Alberta’s Peace Country, spent many summers stationed at remote fire lookout towers. For decades, he created numerous paintings of the local landscape from memory and observation. One of the subjects he returned to continuously throughout his life was wildfires, capturing the power and spirit of these incredible forces of nature in his work.

Megan Green grew up in Fort McMurray. Through painting, drawing and sculpture, she examines the human and environmental costs of extraction and consumption. In this exhibition, her work responds to the devastating 2016 Horse River Wildfire and explores the complex realities of living in the ‘tar-sands.’ She uses the recurring motif of melted plastic: strange, unearthly artifacts from after the fire, weaving this thread throughout her work. In addition, Green incorporates found objects, such as antlers, velvet upholstery, hunting trophy plaques, faux wood paneling and plastic tourist trinkets into her work– each item closely linked to industry and small town Alberta life.

Fire Season is the 2nd in a series of exhibitions pairing an artist from the Gallery’s permanent collection (Robert Guest) with an artist connected to Northern Alberta (Megan Green). This presentation of their work together considers our changing relationship to the land, the growing intensity of wildfires and what they reveal about the world we’ve made.

Curated by Jessica Groome

View more of Megan Green’s artwork at @megangreen_art