Upcoming Exhibition

Opening Reception with Artist’s Tour

Thursday, September 10 at 6 – 8:30PM

Looking at the dotted sandstone-inspired canvases, you might see a charged nervous system, a celestial body or the microcosm of a riverbed’s speckled surface. The depth of each painting by Vancouver-based Landon Mackenzie reveals the linen canvas as a site-responsive material that soaks up its environment: saltwater, sunshine, wind, rain, dew and starry nights—all become foundational materials in Mackenzie’s works. Merging paint and weather, the canvases evoke the intimate connection between internal and external landscapes. To begin this bi-coastal project, Mackenzie first stapled the river-soaked linen to a wooden porch on Prince Edward Island, where she applied a multitude of colours. The artist next rolled and shipped the work like a tapestry to her Vancouver studio, where she responded to the transformed surface. Each of these large paintings was enlivened from its interaction with East Coast summer tides before coalescing in the artist’s West Coast studio. 

With a career spanning five decades, Landon Mackenzie is well known for her large-format paintings, which are exhibited widely and held in prestigious collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Vaughn, ON, 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 in Visual and Media Arts. Based in Vancouver, Mackenzie is a professor emerita at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. 

We are pleased to announce the publication of Landon Mackenzie: Weather Patterns, a catalogue to accompany this exhibition, made possible by the generous support of the Audain Foundation and Nicholas Metivier Gallery. Books will be available for sale at The Gallery starting in October, with an artist’s talk and publication signing on November 17.