Landscape art integrates human impact at the AGR
Art | Gregory Beatty
View from the Edge of the World
Art Gallery of Regina
Until Oct. 22
In the art hierarchy, landscape painting is about as basic as it gets. That’s not to say there isn’t some wonderful work out there. It’s just, landscape is typically seen as a relatively benign genre without much depth beyond the fetishization of our exalted “dominion over nature”. Or capitalism’s capacity to contain and extract “value” from nature. Or, on the flipside, a poignant reminder of the environmental damage being done by that “value” extraction.
Okay, maybe landscape painting isn’t as benign as it sometimes seems. Depending on the artist and era, it can be laden with meaning. That’s true, even in conventional landscape work. And it’s especially true in View from the Edge of the World — a group exhibition which opened at Art Gallery of Regina on Aug. 18.
View from the Edge of the World features work by Vera Saltzman & Sue Bland, SpekWork Studio, Catherine Joa, Mike Keepness, Gladys Wozny Siemens and Golboo Amani. It’s curated by the AGR’s Sandee Moore.
The exhibition had its origins, Moore said in a recent gallery visit, in her invitation from CARFAC SASK to do studio visits with visual artists in Swift Current, Yorkton and Prince Albert.
“My inspiration often comes from ideas or media that I see artists working with,” says Moore. “I had long thought about doing a show like this, then when I discovered artists whose practices related to landscape in such interesting and unique ways, it really drew out that idea.
“Many people might have preconceived ideas about what landscape art is, but the artists here are subtly and not so subtly providing new ways to think about and reinvent the genre,” she says.
Graffiti to Board Games
As Moore notes, strategies the artists use to “reinvent” the genre range from subtle to not-so subtle.
Let’s start with the former. As a counterbalance to the “dominion over nature” side of landscape painting, artists sometimes go too far and present romanticized scenes of nature scraped clean of human presence.
While View from the Edge of the World’s artists are universally critical of the wringer extractive capitalism puts nature through, they don’t ignore human presence (or impact) on the landscape.
“When we think about the land in Saskatchewan, most people think of a wheat or canola field,” says Moore. “But that’s a human-made landscape. Humans not only shape the land, we’re also part of the land, so to include markers of human activity is an important part of the exhibition.
“Most explicitly, Vera and Sue’s installation, “Where Will the Frogs Sing?”looks at the loss of remnant or wild land. That would include wetlands, windbreaks and borderlands that once existed between small farms that are being erased as we move to industrial-scale farming,” Moore adds.
Saltzman and Bland live in the Fort Qu’Appelle area, and as a photographer and writer respectively, they’ve assembled a wall-spanning array of photographs, writings, archival material, found objects, prints, and even an eight-page newspaper — all critiquing the toll industrial agriculture takes on the prairie landscape.
Less explicit — but still impactful — are six paintings by Catherine Joa set in Canada’s boreal forest region. To begin with, they’re all tall and narrow, as opposed to the landscape genre’s typical horizontal format. Measuring seven feet by three feet, the paintings convey the majesty of the landscape, which is dominated by scraggly trees and jutting rock outcroppings.
Highways are one constant in Joa’s paintings. While some viewers might regard them as a blight on the landscape, for locals they can be a lifeline, says Moore.
“Catherine takes pains to include the highway which, for a lot of people in remote communities, is essential to their daily life. It’s such an important feature of the landscape, and something that people would normally want to remove to achieve this idea of pure nature,” she says.
Another constant in Joa’s paintings is roadside graffiti. Again, there is an impulse to erase. But none of the “tags” are obscene. “be Happy” is one, while a second depicts a bright red heart outlined in white.
Rather than despoiling the landscape, the graffiti seems more whimsical — in the tradition, say, of cave paintings and petroglyphs from millennia past.
Now, onto less subtle ways that the artists subvert and reinvent landscape.
Gladys Wozny Siemens is a front-runner there. Instead of presenting a standard 2-D representation, she literally embodies the landscape by creating plaster casts of sections of a dried riverbed.
“Although it might seem like a barren area, there are many animal tracks there, and plants that have been trampled into the mud. There are shells, and even what Gladys calls ‘bird strikes’ where a bird has been hunting and scooped something up, and the wings have brushed the wet mud and made slashes in it,” says Moore.
The casts are clearly sculptural but, framed and hung on the wall in a horizontal format, they mimic conventional landscape paintings.
“She’s inverting this view that we think we know and presenting it a new way where these bird feet and paw prints are coming at us,” says Moore. “She also includes human-made tracks from an ATV, and letters or geometric shapes that she’s impressed into the mud.”
Probably the most unique take on landscape is Golboo Amani’s Unsettling Settlers Intervention, which Moore describes as “an expansion pack for the board game Settlers of Catan”.
“Settlers is a board game where the objective is to take control of the land and extract resources. It’s also competitive about forcing other players off the board or off the land,” says Moore.
“The expansion pack provides for two types of players. Some follow the ordinary rules, then there’s a second group called Allies. Instead of competing, the Allies work together and disrupt the way the game usually works where the focus is on extracting resources and hoarding all the land,” she says.
On Oct. 6, the AGR hosts a cosplay/game session with Amani in attendance. A kitchen table conversation tied to Saltzman and Bland’s installation was held on Sept. 23, and on Oct. 5 there’s a live sound art activation of SpekWork’s installation GAN of Living Skies which projects a series of A.I. generated, solar-powered, Saskatchewan sunsets. See AGR website for details. ■