Nicholas Metivier Gallery is excited to present Echo, an exhibition of new works by Landon Mackenzie on view Saturday, May 2nd through Saturday, May 30th. Please join us for an artist talk at Nicholas Metivier Gallery with Landon Mackenzie and John Geoghegan on Saturday, May 2nd at 1PM. Geoghegan is the Associate Curator of Collections and Research at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. RSVP here.
In Mackenzie’s new exhibition, Echo, the title resonates both literally and conceptually. Cerulean Echo is a large, immersive canvas at the centre of the show that was made over a year, in her characteristic process of gradually responding to each previous layer. Situated in the middle of a pale yellow background is a swirling vortex created with deep blue-black, cerulean blue, and green dots that seemingly embody an echo in real time. At the earliest stages Mackenzie gave each small dark circle a shadow, as if an echo of itself.
“Cerulean Echo is the fifth painting in my Hummingbird series made concurrently with Hummingbird (Lilac) in 2025. A familiar vortex motif appears like a spider web or a kind of nest for a hummingbird to dart in and out of for feeding her young and protection.”
- Landon Mackenzie
Surrounding this work in the exhibition are works on paper, an important part of her practice for over five decades and the subject of a travelling survey museum exhibition, Parallel Journey (2015-2017). Using ink, gesso, watercolour and gouache, these more intimate works are also layered and explore similar themes to the large canvases yet, they are never created as studies. Instead, they expand upon her ongoing dialogue and the two practices bounce off of one another, echoing their counterpart.
In two of the works on paper, an ‘orb’ floats in the middle of the image, flanked by strands of luminous colour that resemble a landscape or seascape. It might be the moon dipping into the river or the sun seen through a pathway of clouds. As always, Mackenzie follows a myriad of threads and lines of logic, all of which coexist within the final work.
With a career spanning five decades, Landon Mackenzie's large-format paintings are exhibited widely and held in prestigious collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, among many others. Raised in Toronto, she studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax and Concordia University in Montreal. Her contribution to Canadian art has been recognized with the Queen Elizabeth II Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals and the 2017 Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts. Based in Vancouver, Mackenzie is a professor emerita at Emily Carr University.
