“Her engagement with a world way beyond the framing edge is marked by her attempted defiance within it…”

Canadian artist Landon Mackenzie (b. 1954) is known for complex, large-scale immersive paintings and compelling works on paper. Numerous awards include the prestigious Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2017). Her paintings are in several Canadian museums and regularly hang in permanent collection exhibitions including at the National Gallery of Canada, The AGO, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Vancouver Art Gallery, McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Audain Art Museum to name a few*.

Survey exhibitions of her art include Landon Mackenzie: Nervous Centre at The Esker Foundation, Calgary (2012-13); Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2014-2015); and Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey: 40 Years of Work on Paper (1975-2015) organized and toured by the Kelowna Art Gallery (2016-2018). Internationally she has been in exhibitions such as True North: The Landscape in Contemporary Canadian Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Kaohsiung, Taiwan (1998); and Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space (2011) at HKW/ Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. Further, Mackenzie’s paintings can be found in several Canadian Embassies including in London and Paris.

Raised in Toronto, Mackenzie left home at 17 to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art, which brought her into a hotbed of early seventies Conceptual Art in Halifax and its concurrent revitalization of printmaking through the NSCAD Lithography Workshop. After her BFA (1972-76), a short-lived move north with her partner was followed by going back and forth between the Yukon and Montreal as she completed an MFA at Concordia University (1976-79) and painted in her shared studio on Rue Clark.

By the late seventies, Mackenzie had switched her focus from printmaking to painting and in 1981 received First Prize at the III Quebec Biennale of Painting. She began showing with Galerie France Morin with her critically acclaimed Lost River Series. Other shows in this period included Mercer Union, Toronto (1982) and the 49th Parallel in New York (1985).

In 1986, Mackenzie moved her young family to Vancouver for a permanent teaching position at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (then College) where for over three decades she has been an influential teacher and mentor in Studio Art. She remains an Emeritus Professor, and a co-founder of the studio building at 188 W 3rd. In 2001 she designed a summer indoor-outdoor studio on the Cardigan River in Prince Edward Island where a number of her pictures, including the recent Weather Pattern series have been made.

Residences include the Emma Lake Artist’s Workshop where Mackenzie was the invited co-leader (1995), and other projects in Canada, China, Spain, Berlin and Paris. Recent invitational shows in private galleries include Paul Kyle/Elan Fine Art, Vancouver; Robert Kardosh/Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver; and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal. With an artistic career spanning almost five decades, she was previously represented by Serge Vaisman/Art 45 in Montreal. Since 2018 she has been represented by the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto.

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Mackenzie is grateful to live on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. As non-native settlers, she and her family understand that the land we call Vancouver was never legally ceded to the Crown.