A.J. Casson, Mill Houses, 1928, oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Duncan MacTavisk, 1955 (00-066)
Exhibitions
Inhabited Landscape: Selections from the Canadian Historical Collection
Historical Feature and R. Fraser Elliott Galleries
30 August 2008 - 26 April 2009
Wild, northern, empty: these are the words that often come to mind when we think about Canadian landscape, and especially the Group of Seven. Inhabited Landscape invites you to take a fresh look at Canadian landscape from a different, more populated perspective. The exhibition highlights key artworks by Group of Seven members and their modernist contemporaries in the Art Centre collection, including J.E.H. MacDonald's Wild Ducks, A.J. Casson's Mill Houses, Arthur Lismer's Quebec Village, F.H. Varley's Three Mountaineers, David Milne's Carnival Dress, Dominion Square, Montreal, Prudence Heward's Church at Athens, Yvonne McKague Housser's Milkweed, and the war sketchbooks of Edwin Holgate. All of the major Group of Seven canvases at the Art Centre are, in fact, inhabited landscapes.
Since the beginning of the landscape tradition in Canada, artists have been peopling the outdoors and recording the marks we make on the earth. The exhibition also features inhabited landscapes by the Group of Seven's predecessors: topographic colonial watercolours, sublime Confederation-era images, late nineteenth-century agrarian idylls, and bold Impressionist views, including an early work by Emily Carr and other works by Frederick A. Verner, Homer Watson, Horatio Walker, and J.W. Morrice. What is absent can be as glaring as what is present, no truer than when artists tried to recapture what they perceived as vanishing ways of life. Landscape painting also implies the artist's own presence, and with a foregrounded shore or rocky ledge from which to contemplate the view, the artist may include you too as an inhabitant.
In conjunction with the exhibition, on Wenesday 29 October, 7:30 pm, the Art Centre will present the Frances K. Smith Lecture in Canadian Art, featuring Dr. John O'Brian. This year's talk is entitled "The Bomb in the Wilderness: Thinking About Nuclear Photography". Endowed by curator emerita and long-time Art Centre supporter Frances K. Smith, this annual lecture series provides the opportunity to invite a pre-eminent scholar in Canadian art history to lecture at the Art Centre. This year's speaker Dr. John O'Brian, is co-editor of the recently published Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007). He has published extensively on modern art history, theory and criticism, and is Professor of Art History and Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. Please join us in the Atrium of the Art Centre for what promises to be a fascinating lecture.
Alicia Boutilier
This exhibition is presented with the support of the Ontario Arts Council (an agency of the Government of Ontario), the Kingston Arts Council, the City of Kingston, the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund (Queen's University), and the Janet Braide Memorial Fund.