Opening Reception: Thursday, May 2, 6-8 pm.
Artist talk with Sarah Milroy: Saturday, May 4 at 2 pm
Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Landon Mackenzie. The exhibition will open on May 2nd and run until May 25th with an opening reception on Thursday, May 2nd. The gallery will host a talk with Landon Mackenzie and Sarah Milroy, Chief Curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, on Saturday May 4th at 2 pm.
Landon Mackenzie is a senior Canadian artist widely known for her large-format, abstract paintings. They are made over long periods of time, sometimes several years and their surfaces are layered using an intuitive and informed approach. Mackenzie’s symbolic gestures and motifs reference her research and personal experiences with geometry and history. Maps play an important role in her work and her paintings often correlate with her frequent travels across the globe to countries including China, Germany and France.
Particle Paintings is Mackenzie’s first solo exhibition at Nicholas Metivier Gallery and is her largest commercial show in many years. Featuring six new large canvases completed between 2013 and 2019, two are from her project, Big Pink Sky. The first of this series hangs in the permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery following her exhibition there with Emily Carr. The second is permanently installed at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, British Columbia. The painting surfaces are covered with her signature “particle” pattern in a nuanced palette of pink, greys and white. This exhibition will present the third and fourth variations of these large-scale, complex works. Another painting presented for the first time is Time Machine, partly titled for its epic journey to completion. It is made up of larger, multi-colored circles in a dark purple field, as though one is looking through a magnifying glass at one of the adjacent paintings. Depending on the scale of the circles, composition and palette, all six works evoke celestial or cellular connotations. The paintings are immersive and communicate like visual messages through their vibrant use of colour and expressive marks.
The exhibition also includes works on paper, an important medium in Mackenzie’s oeuvre. The travelling museum survey, Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey, celebrated this remarkable body of work. Mackenzie has participated in several international residencies as well as her own research trips. She also spends part of each summer in her studio on Prince Edward Island. It is during these times that she focuses on paper both for its convenient scale as well as its accessibility to record the influx of ideas and inspiration when she encounters new places. Mackenzie sources rare and unusual papers such as the translucent, glitter-infused Red Star Chinese paper she used during her 2018 residency in rural China. Five of these inventive works will be shown here. Though her works on paper are similar in their motifs and use of colour, Mackenzie does not consider them studies for her large canvases but rather a parallel practice. Her delicate gestures and sensitivity to the paper highlight her skill for working on both intimate and monumental scales.
Landon Mackenzie grew up in Toronto, moving later to Halifax and Montreal to study. She has lived and worked in Vancouver for the last thirty-three years where she became the first full Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She holds a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a MFA from Concordia University. In 2017, Landon Mackenzie was a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts and Media. Her works are included in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Art Gallery of Ontario. Recent Museum exhibitions include Parallel Journey: Works on Paper, organized and toured by the Kelowna Art Gallery (2015-2018);Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey, Vancouver Art Gallery (2014- 2015) and Landon Mackenzie: Nervous Centre, Esker Foundation, Calgary (2012). She has an upcoming exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum in the fall (2019).
