Landscapes from Coast to Coast

McMichael exhibition looks at nature up and down through an interesting pastiche

Perhaps it is not a revolutionary idea to fit the core of Canadian identity with the people's survival of its landscape. But what strikes one as new in this latest summer exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection is the concept that our own personal encounters with such disparate Canadian landscapes might in fact unite us in a kind of solidarity. For certainly the physical geography forces us into a seeming alienation. This paradox, showcased by the artists in the Sense of Place show, pushes the dialogue with nature out from the one-to-one relation, and into a nationalist picture of our country.
Split into three themes, the show moves from the Art of the Northwestwest Coast to Arctic Images, to the more generalized theme of Overland & Underfoot, where vast visions of the land juxtapose crowded, more microscopic versions. Taken together, they speak of how the landscape reveals more about its viewer than its own hills and valleys. In Dialogue and Divergence: Art of the Northwest Coast, we see a contested territory play out its political backgammon through the seemingly simple brushstroke. Rarely seen Mungo Martin masks and totem poles created by Charles Edenshaw sit alongside works by A.Y. Jackson, Frederick Varley, and Emily Carr. The first screams a presence that is alive and well, a First Nations community still active and contemporary, while the later artists zone in on the decay of a vanishing culture. Carr's vision bent the First Nations reality into a historical event, quickly fading, with the icons of old, decaying architecture and totem poles - a clearly non-First Nations perspective of the land.
The Arctic Image too carries over this insider/outsider tension, resulting in a criss-crossing dialogue about what the Canadian north inspires. While ironically, several works by southern artists in this exhibition predate those by Inuit artists by at least a generation, their vision of the arctic is expansive and two-dimensional, abstracted often into geometric islands of ice. From the inside, Inuit from the North gave birth to sculpture first, rather than the pictorial image, simply because their nomadic lifestyle dictated that objects be small and portable. Today Inuit artists are noted for their skill as printmakers and painters, but production in the various new media, including sculpture from the contemporary period, is a very recent phenomenon that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. What's interesting about this exhibit is the pastiche of the modern Inuit palette - graphics, stills, video, and text, indicating that the organic, progressive quality of the Inuit style. It is a fact that is often overlooked in most museums, who house the work of Inuit artists in sterile glass boxes, as if those very boxes could stunt the growth of their legacy.
Overland & Underfoot caters to Group of Seven fans and highlights their revisionist perceptions of nature - the macro and the micro. Lawren Harris and Franklin Carmichael enter the canvas as a kind of cartographer and J.E.H. MacDonald and Arthur Lismer perceive the leaves and trees as an obscure fractal. Both versions are expansive in their depictions and redefine a walk through the woods, the key being if we are looking up or down when we step forward. One can only speculate what the new breed of Canadian painters would bring to such an exhibit. I imagine the McMichael 100 years from now, I see the Overland and Underfoot of cities, the sidewalks and the skyline set with ferociously ugly buildings, a larger perspective on urban maps, created by the sad Canadian who never ventured into the natural landscape at all. What is the future of landscape in Canada? Only time can tell.

Publication Date: 2003-07-20
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2950