Today@Dal

In 1999, the Canada Council for the Arts created the Governor General Awards for Visual and Media Arts. Each year up to 7 artists are honoured for their artistic achievements and contributions to the visual and media arts. Past recipients of the award include: Alex Colville, Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Betty Goodwin, John Greer, Arnaud Maggs, Jan Peacock, and Claude Tousignant.

Dalhousie Art Gallery is currently showing Parallel Journey: Works on Paper, an exhibition by Landon Mackenzie, who is among this year’s winners.

Landon came to Halifax at the age of 17 in 1972 and studied drawing, printmaking, and animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which was then located on Coburg Road—the site now occupied by Dalhousie’s Mona Campbell building. Mackenzie travels widely and has lectured and worked across Canada and in cities around the world, including Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Taipei, and Kabwe (Zambia). She has been Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver since 1986, and returns to the Maritimes every summer where she maintains a studio on Prince Edward Island.

Landon is known mostly for her large canvases in which she depicts the (Canadian) landscape through experimental methods. Parallel Journey features smaller works on paper—watercolours, prints, notebooks, and photographs—that track the artist’s progressions through her ideas, from figuration to abstraction, from diaristic grids to narrative painting, from experimental cartography of the landscape to the visualization of memory and neural microcosm.

Parallel Journey is currently on view at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, 6101 University Avenue, until Sunday 23 April.

http://ggavma.canadacouncil.ca/landon-mackenzie

http://artgallery.dal.ca/landon-mackenzie-parallel-journey-works-paper-1975-2015

Installation view of Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey, at Dalhousie Art Gallery. Photo: Angela Glanzmann.

Installation view of Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey, at Dalhousie Art Gallery. Photo: Angela Glanzmann.

Landon Mackenzie, Untitled (Banff - Neurotree series), 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.