Landon Mackenzie: Recollect(s)

×

Expand

Landon Mackenzie, "Neurostar (yellow)," 2011

oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.

Landon Mackenzie: Recollect(s)

Reception: November 5, 7–9 p.m.

Artist and Curator’s Talk: November 23, 2 p.m.

Film Screening of The Other Side of the Picture and Landscape as Muse: December 5, 6:30 p.m.

Artist Conversation with Gerta Moray: December 14, 2 p.m.

Landon Mackenzie: Recollect(s) features a selection of works from the artist’s 40-year career, shown alongside key paintings by Jock Macdonald, Walter Yarwood, Harold Town, Michael Snow and Gordon Smith. With the inclusion of these powerful proponents of Canadian abstraction—as well as a 1912 painting by Emily Carr paired with Mackenzie’s Woo ll (After Carr) from 2014—this exhibition establishes a dialogue between Mackenzie and the past, highlighting the influence of her predecessors on her practice.

The artworks in this exhibition were assembled by Mackenzie’s family in the late 1950s. Mackenzie grew up in a Victorian home in Toronto surrounded by her family’s collection of non-representational paintings. At an early age, and with her parents’ encouragement, she frequented some of the city’s most avant-garde galleries, including the Isaacs Gallery, Here and Now, Carmen Lamanna and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Harold Town, of the Painters Eleven artists’ collective, was a mentor and powerful influence. Vancouver curator Alvin Balkind—who, with Abraham Rogatnick, founded the New Design Gallery in West Vancouver in 1955—introduced Mackenzie’s parents to pictures by West Coast artists, including Gordon Smith. Other friends in the Toronto milieu included Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow and Dorothy Cameron, all of whom guided the teenage Mackenzie toward a sense of independence and a life as an artist. In 1972, she left Toronto for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, after which she attended graduate school in Montreal, where she studied with Guido Molinari and Irene Whittome.

Mackenzie’s impressive body of work includes her Lost River Series, Saskatchewan Paintings and other large-format mapping paintings, and her recent Particle abstractions; Her accomplished works on paper are less well-known. Her work has been shown in more than 100 exhibitions and is collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Vancouver Art Gallery, among others. Honoured with numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2017, she is represented by Art 45 in Montreal and the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto. She is professor emerita at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with essays by Mackenzie, Darrin Morrison and Gerta Moray.