Nancy Lowry, Colour in Place, at the Remai

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Nancy Lowry,  “Web” (detail), 2008, oil on panel, 58" x 2" (collection of Margaret Lowry, photo by Carey Shaw)

In looking at her work, it’s clear that Nancy Lowry is intimately familiar with the history of both formalist abstraction and landscape painting in Saskatchewan.

That said, she doesn’t emulate her forebears. Instead she assimilates and transmogrifies the lessons she has learned to create an idiosyncratic visual language all her own.

Colour in Place, the largest survey of Lowry’s work to date, is on view at the Remai Modern through April 6, 2025.

In this ambitious exhibition, Remai Modern’s assistant curator, Bevin Bradley, has skillfully corralled dozens of rowdy panels into a deeply satisfying visual experience. This is no small feat: the paintings are deliciously complex in the breadth of their mark making, relentlessly inventive compositions and unruly colour palettes. Hot pink trees glimmer near teal foliage, purple branches reach towards a pale lemon sky. For Lowry, the landscape serves as a point of departure rather than a final destination, where she connects us to the soul of the forest rather than its likeness. 

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Nancy Lowry, “Into the Mystic,” 2018, oil on panel, 36" x 53" (courtesy of the artist and ArtPlacement, photo by Carey Shaw)

Although the work presented dates from 2001 to 2024, it never stagnates, instead joyfully mutating and evolving with time.

What distinguishes the exhibition and Lowry's approach from many who look to similar influences, is her connection to both community and place. The latter is established through her relationship to the University of Saskatchewan’s Kenderdine Campus. Lowry attended camps there in her early teens, and then Emma Lake Artist’s Workshops in 2001 and 2003. From 2007 to 2012, she coordinated the workshops.

For Lowry, these experiences were pivotal in developing her relationship to the land. Although much of the original Kenderdine Campus has since been torn down, Lowry often returns to the site to visit the forest. She remains optimistic  that one day a new centre for art and science will be rebuilt there. 

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Nancy Lowry, “Twilight Troops,” 2008, oil on canvas, 24" x 48" (courtesy of the artist, photo by Carey Shaw)

Lowry’s love of the boreal forest is not surprising, given the landscape references in even the most abstract of her paintings. Perhaps less obvious is her relationship to community. This becomes apparent, however, as viewers tour Colour in Place.

Interspersed among Lowry’s vibrant panels are works by artists who have been influential. Many, such as Margaret Vanderhaeghe, Tammi Campbell and Elizabeth McIntosh, attended or led the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops at the same time as Lowry. Others, like Reta Cowley and Mina Forsyth, inspired her posthumously. This strategy not only creates a wonderful web of connections between (mostly) women artists across generations, it allows Lowry to recognize on whose shoulders she stands. This is a generous and political act in a world that sells the myth of the  solitary-genius-artist pulling ideas from thin air. It also offers recognition to several important women artists who did not get their due. 

While most of the gallery is dominated by paintings, there is a small installation tucked behind a wall at the back of the gallery. Here, we find a replica of Lowry’s studio as it existed at the aka/Paved Community studios. In addition to painting tools and works in progress, the installation features additional cross fertilization and collaboration. A tripod belonging to her late father holds a belt-type sculpture she created with Regina artists Melanie Monique Rose, Wendy Naepflin, Eva Seidenfaden and Cassie Danielle Rosteski at an Emma International Collaboration.

A walking stick that she has used as a mobility device for much of her life served as the basis for two additional collaborations. The first was with Leah Rosenberg, who submerged a facsimile of the walking stick in paint to create a three-dimensional painting.

Lowry is currently working on a second stick collaboration with sculptor Clint Neufeld. Hoping to use her walking stick as a paintbrush in order to extend her reach and create larger paintings, Lowry has worked with Neufeld to replicate the stick’s ergonomic handle. Using three-dimensional printing technology, Neufeld created replicas that can then be attached to longer branches and brushes and used in the studio. These hang on the wall at the Remai, waiting for Lowry to dip them in oils.

Behind all of these intriguing objects there is a little doorway: pass through it and Leah Rosenberg’s Colour In Twelve Parts plays on a loop. As Rosenberg paints, dances and sings through the colour wheel, it is almost as if she is there, hard at work in the studio next to Lowry’s.

As we round the corner we come upon a set of three brightly coloured benches at the center of another room of paintings. These were born of a collaboration with Todd Gronsdahl, and are based on the benches that surrounded the firepit in the main dining hall at the Kenderdine Campus at Emma Lake. She hoped, Lowry told me, that the benches would provide a place for artists to gather and talk during the run of the exhibition. While most artists (myself included) would place benches in such a way as to facilitate viewing of the work, Lowry is equally interested in facilitating a place for us to gather and share. Whether you settle among these stunning landscapes and turn your gaze towards the work or towards each other, Colour In Place is an exhibition that is not to be missed. ■

Nancy Lowry, Colour in Place, is on view at the Remai Modern through April 6, 2025

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