Artists on Contemporary Canadian Landscapes at the McMichael

In 2007, the ground shifted in Canadian art history. Beyond Wilderness, co-edited by John O’Brian and Peter White and featuring a diverse roster of curators, art historians, artists, and thought leaders from across Canada and beyond, challenged the entrenched connection between national identity and landscape art that had taken root during the decades-long popularity of the Group of Seven. The book traces how, beginning in the 1960s and continuing in the decades that followed, contemporary landscape art channelled the increasingly complex social, economic, political, technological, and environmental factors that have transformed the ways in which artists—and audiences—understand their relationship to place. 

We at the McMichael enthusiastically share this view that the Group of Seven’s legacy must be continuously interrogated and recontextualized within the larger, evolving stories of Canadian art. So when Gabrielle Moser, director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University, approached us about launching a national series of events marking the twentieth anniversary of Beyond Wilderness, it was only natural that we would say yes.  

On Sunday, June 24, the McMichael curator, John Geoghegan, led a panel discussion featuring the artists Sky Glabush (London), Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka (Toronto), and Michelle Sound (Vancouver). Each artist spoke about his or her approach to artmaking, recent projects, and elaborated on a work of their own that has recently come into the McMichael collection. Hatanaka and Sound talked about how their artistic practices draw on natural forms through connections to personal and family histories. Hatanaka uses natural inks to print the sculptural formations of blowing Arctic snow onto handmade Japanese paper, intertwining her interest in her family heritage with her own extensive experiences in the Arctic. Sound takes photographs of her family’s ancestral territories, tears them, and then repairs them, blending traditional mending and decoration techniques with colourful contemporary materials. Glabush reflected on how forms and phenomena from the natural world serve him as portals to creative exploration and have provided sanctuary at critical periods of his life.  

Overall, the discussion affirmed the premise put forward by Beyond Wilderness twenty years ago—that the natural world remains a powerful and enduring source of inspiration in contemporary artmaking and is channelled by artists today to communicate new and urgent truths about individual and shared experience. At its most affecting, this art is imbued with each maker’s unique story: the territories of their past and present, and what they see on the horizon.