DAGMARA GENDA: "Panorama," June 15 to August 25, Esker Foundation, Calgary

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Photo: Robert McNair; courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

"Panorama (detail)"

Dagmara Genda, "Panorama (detail)," 2012, collage, brush and ink on paper, 50.5” x 8’ diameter.

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Photo: Robert McNair; courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

"Panorama (detail)"

Dagmara Genda, "Panorama (detail)," 2012, collage, brush and ink on paper, 50.5” x 8’ diameter.

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Photo: Robert McNair; courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

"Panorama"

Dagmara Genda, "Panorama," 2012, collage, brush and ink on paper, 50.5” x 8’ diameter.

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Photo: Robert McNair; courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

"Panorama"

Dagmara Genda, "Panorama," 2012, collage, brush and ink on paper, 50.5” x 8’ diameter.

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Photo: Robert McNair; courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

"Panorama"

Dagmara Genda, "Panorama," 2012, collage, brush and ink on paper, 50.5” x 8’ diameter.

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DAGMARA GENDA

ALBERTA: Panorama, June 15 to August 25, Esker Foundation, Calgary

By Margaret Bessai

A short flight of stairs invites viewers into Saskatoon-based artist Dagmara Genda’s drawing installation, Panorama. The work is suspended like an enormous lampshade, encircling the viewing platform. Modelled on a historical way of displaying picturesque scenes, it tackles similar subject matter taken from contemporary sources such as calendars, photography books and travel brochures, but the imagery is not rendered using realist conventions.

Instead, moose, foxes, birds and rabbits are fitted intricately together, limbs and bodies heaped, entangled and merged. Fur and feathers melt into brushstrokes. Trees form out of fractal-shaped swirls of wet-on-wet paint. Eyes float in a cloud of ink droplets. Genda’s process is intensive. She scans, prints, cuts out and collages images onto paper, then adds ink and paint. “The cutting and layering process is rather complex,” she says. “I use a combination of projectors and tracing paper to accurately cut and combine images, much like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Threaded through the swirling, interconnected plants and animals is a wooden railing and observation towers. The effect, says Genda, is to fence viewers in with the animals and the land. Unlike conventionally framed landscapes, her panorama “consumes the viewer who can never see it in its entirety at once.”

How are cultural beliefs expressed in the construction of viewing practices? Genda explores this question as she considers the ways we understand our relationships with animals and the land: “Because I’m originally from Poland, but was raised in Canada, I’m particularly interested in the national forms cultures take on,” she says. “Poland doesn’t use nature and wilderness to describe itself, but Canada does. These differences are fascinating to me … How do we come to see a place through this sort of lens?”

Today, the word panorama describes an overview or an extra-wide landscape, but the term was coined by Irish painter Robert Barker in 1787 to describe a room-sized painting, circularly mounted to present a scene in a full 360-degree format. Panoramas took many forms and became mass-market entertainment. Incorporating music, educational narration and oversized images of great battles, natural wonders and historic sites, they toured newly industrialized cities in Europe and the Americas. Panorama was the IMAX documentary of the 1800s. Although dismissed by the intellectual elite, these exhibitions helped popularize the Romantic vision of the sublime, with mountains, waterfalls, thunderclouds and sunsets thought to offer deep emotional resonance. In his social history of landscape, American essayist William Cronon links these ideas to early Western environmentalism and the places Americans chose for their first national parks – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Rainier, Zion and the Grand Canyon.

Earlier this year, Panorama toured Canada as part of Ecotopia, an examination of environmentalism guest curated by Amanda Cachia for Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. For this solo exhibition at the Esker, Genda has added five new portrait-style collaged drawings of animals, using similar techniques to Panorama. “I wanted to take very cliché and, frankly, dull images and make them interesting … to remove them from their tamed confines,” says Genda, who has an MFA from the University of Western Ontario in London. “I use coffee-table book images, drawing and tracing, to create complex images that hopefully defy one single perspective on nature.”

Caption

ABOVE and above right: Panorama, 2012, collage, brush and ink on paper, 50.5” x 8’ diameter