Landon MacKenzie

A comprehensive exhibition of Landon MacKenzie’s works on paper, titled “Landon MacKenzie, Parallel Journey: Works on Paper (1975–2015),” opened at the Kelowna Art Gallery last October. The exhibition, which will travel, is accompanied by a substantial book featuring four essays, including one by the curator Liz Wylie, a wealth of reproductions and an illustrated chronology of the artist’s life. “Parallel Journey” was partitioned in thematic segments roughly corresponding to a timeline of MacKenzie’s career. The chronological installation, which was supported by didactic panels and numerous vitrines containing artists’ notes, sketchbooks, exhibition announcements, maps and assorted ephemera, contributed to the density and distinctly museological aesthetic of this engaging exhibition.

The general audience for “Parallel Journey” may be familiar with MacKenzie’s work largely through her canvases, which have received ongoing critical acclaim since her first major paintings, “The Lost River Series,” were shown in the early ’80s. Notably, the artist only took up painting in a serious manner after getting her MFA from Concordia in 1979. Previously her focus was drawing and printmaking. Her prints and paper works were exhibited and collected in the ’70s; since then, however, the artist and exhibition curators have almost exclusively targeted large works on canvas for public presentation. Thus “Parallel Journey” presented a rare opportunity to see paper works that, while modest in size compared to the near mural scale of her canvases, are certainly capable of competing with them on a visual and conceptual level.

Landon MacKenzie’s early work in printmaking, done while at NSCAD and later at Concordia, reveal her attempts to make conceptual-oriented art sublimated in mark-making, line, cryptic symbols and other graphic notations. There is the sense that MacKenzie was looking for a subject and in its absence focused on pure mark-making and printmaking processes which resulted in the nervous, tentative, often forced abstractions that these prints ultimately are. Although the prints and drawings may lack a certain conceptual rigour they do point to the artist’s emerging graphic sensibilities, particularly diagrammatic and notational mark-making and systems-oriented processes that, along with colour, have become hallmarks of her mature style. Which, it might be argued, began with the canvases and paper works of the mid- to late-’90s, in particular the “Saskatchewan Paintings.” In reference to this period, “Parallel Journey” included a standout watercolour titled Untitled (Saskatchewan Nocturne), 1994, and a few pieces from Emma Lake, where the artist was in residence in 1995.

MacKenzie is a resourceful and thorough researcher who, in the context of a thematic work cycle, may pore over maps, texts, statistical data and graphs, diagrams, photographs and related archival materials in support of information gathering and concept development. Such resources often directly influence the visual form and meaning of her work, and indirectly set in motion improvisational and free-form variations on a theme. The dialectical exchange or interplay between translation and improvisation foreground her paper works from the mid-’90s on and which, one might argue, have even more visual and conceptual clarity than her canvases. For example in Canal, (ZK/U Berlin), an ink, gouache and gesso work on paper from the artist’s term of residency in Berlin in 2013, the very abstract exploration of the subject of the canal bears traces of arterial maps or routeing diagrams, but the three most dominant and diagonal lines which might force such a reading could just as easily transform into the contours of a barge, so that arterial lines now become an image, and the secondary lines appear as water ripples. Taking this further, the line above those along the top horizontal edge might now be imagined as a bank of the canal. This deceptively simple off-white, pale grey and black line drawing is an evocative work even without a title, and as is often the case in MacKenzie’s work, the use of a high modernist all-over compositional design further complicates a direct associative reading of scale and subject. The strength of this and her other paper works is in the conceptual anchor that, while securing the artwork’s visual orientation, it allows for imaginative creative expansion into abstraction, repetition and pattern formation, chance and accident. Ideational drawing, or drawing after ideas, is often understood to be investigative and experimental, an amalgam of thinking and drawing at the same time, a type of drawing that, while not inimical to observational drawing, does not require any observed external reference to be enacted. This is a category of drawing that Landon MacKenzie excels at. Because her thematic cycles and investigative research is tied to concrete reality, past and present, the subject is always close at hand while not necessarily being observed. Consequently, and in concert with her process oriented approach, the subject often serves as a jumping off point from which she can speculate, transform and invent outcomes that in appearances alone seem far removed from the subject of the accompanying titles, such as in Stairs, (Kleistpark, Berlin), 2007, or Green Paris (Looking North), 2009. The translation of signals systems in the “Signal Series” are perhaps the most open-ended and least visually verifiable subject motifs she has created, with works such as The Wave (Green), and Signal (Starburst and White Light), both 2015, appearing as all-over and pure retinal colour field paintings on paper. “Parallel Journey” is an eye-opening exhibition of selected works on paper which run parallel to the artist’s more widely known canvas works, but, it is a deeply rewarding exhibition on its own terms, for the range and quality of the work, and for providing new insights into understanding and appreciation of the canvases. ❚

“Parallel Journey: Works on Paper (1975–2015)” was exhibited at Kelowna Art Gallery from October 24, 2015 to January 17, 2016.

Gary Pearson is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan.