Landon Mackenzie

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Vancouver-based artist Landon Mackenzie. Mackenzie was educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and at Concordia University in Montreal and has been working as an artist and educator in Vancouver since 1986. Her work has been exhibited nationally since 1977 and this will be her first solo gallery exhibition in Vancouver.

The exhibition will consist of four large scale acrylic on linen paintings that are part of a recent series that Mackenzie refers to as the Saskatchewan Paintings. These works explore the idea of geographical and psychological territories, and never having lived in the Prairies, Mackenzie constructs an imaginary relationship to this Canadian locale from the perspective of an outsider and a woman. Beginning with an underpainting of text extracted from written histories and her own fictional writing, Mackenzie constructs a space for a number of voices. Through subsequent layers of paint which include fields of colour, images, diagrams and maps, these voices become obscured and fragmented. The result is what the artist describes as a kind of mumbling where presence intersects with place, and where the struggle to speak and find a position within the confusion of contemporary identity is played out. It is a complex criss­-crossing of emotional and intellectual territory with historical, geographical and physical space.