Ken Van Rees: Carbon Capture

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Ken Van Rees, "Carbon Capture," 2021

installation view

Ken Van Rees: Carbon Capture

Reception with Artist Talk: Friday, November 26 (doors open at 6:30PM)

​Ken Van Rees is a landscape painter, and a member of the well-known collective Men Who Paint. However, it was as a soil scientist that he first expressed his life-long love of forests. In 2015, a forest fire burnt his research plots in northern Saskatchewan, and while inspecting the damage to his equipment, he became engrossed with the patterns inscribed on his clothes from the charcoal of the burnt trees. This planted the seeds for an entirely new series of abstract works on canvas that take the form of rubbings and controlled imprints – produced by leaving canvases in the charred forest for extended periods.

In Carbon Capture, Van Rees doesn’t work “strictly as a researcher studying the ecological functions of the forest, but as an artist/researcher designing and experimenting with burnt remnants to create new landscapes.” (KVR)