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Yvonne
Lammerich finds Canadian history alive
and erupting through the surfaces of
Landon
Mackenzie's Tracking Athabasca
Canadian Art
Spring
2001
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Athabasca straddles the northern extremities of the
border dividing Saskatchewan and Alberta. Its name
is synomymous with the old North West, with trappers,
uranium and folklore. "Tracking Athabasca" is
the collective title of Landon Mackenzie's four large,
low-hung and grandly panoramic paintings at Montreal's
Espace 502. In these magnificently imagined works,
Mackenzie brings into focus the twin foundations that
have threaded their way through her painting practice,
and which mark her historic moment. The first of these
is Canada, or rather, the Canada that was — a
colonial nation of histories and mythologies, of half-forgotten
stories at the far edge of Empire. The other is Landon
Mackenzie herself, embodied in the land, in the sky
at night, in the splash of an oar, in the correctness
of a mid-century Toronto afternoon tea. And running
through these twin rivers, a deep and electrifying
eroticism.
Tracking Athabasca, 1998-2000. The title
is cinematic, and just as screen credits open up onto
the here and now of another place and another time,
the works immediately place the viewer on the move,
like a geologist, like a trapper, like a bloodhound,
or like a lover. When standing in front of these four
paintings, the viewer's experience of them becomes
peripheral to the confrontation with a scale larger
than immediate vision. There is more to touch than
is possible to reach.
The Athabasca works are an elaboration on a suite
of paintings made between 1993 and 1997 titled Saskatchewan paintings.
Mackenzie's archival research of the region has contributed
a wealth of visual material on the subject. She includes
early and recent maps, documents on the fur trade,
commercial charters, railway promotions and personal
war records. During this time her paintings came progressively
to embody a complex re-reading of Canada's colonial
histories informed by feminist, postmodernist and post-colonial
theories. As a consequence, the paintings' formal and
densely narrative texts have become overwritten—complicated
palimpsests of data. Also as a consequence, the paintings
are not ideologically conceived, but are instead about
laying bare evidence to which the viewer becomes witness.
For example, in a large painting from 1994, If
I Loved a Cowboy.../Leaving Her Fingerprints all Over
Everything She Does, the viewer is confronted
by three large dark oval shapes situated in a glowing
field of warm yellows, oranges and reds. These ovals
appear burnt out, as though by the heat from filaments
of text and mythic centres a spray of pearls—like
semen—erupts as a string of memories—the
wealth that the trappers and surveyors left behind.
Pearls, semen and memory: Mackenzie's paintings are
inseminated with tiles and stories, and with painterly
inventions. And old Dog-Rib man speaks his vision of
this vast country by remarking that if the white man's
Heaven isn't similar he doesn't want any part of it.
He'd rather have the stillness of feeling and being,
the wind, the infinite expanse, the profusion of flowers,
skies of summer blue and frozen lakes, caribou and
great fat white fish.
From first encounter, the Athabasca paintings
fulfil this promise and much more. The embrace that
invites the viewer is not that of an idealized vision,
but rather a voluptuous generosity in the paintings'
complex visual field that permits the viewer, through
re-enactment, through "tracking," to come
upon loaded incidents encrusted in the paintings' surfaces.
Through a play of disguise and disclosure, these revelations
tear and finally dissolve the great Canadian master
narrative of natural order. And they do so through
facts. Facts that are found, for example, in the Journal
of Occurrences in the Athabasca Department by George
Simpson, 1820-1821, and Report, which records
the making of charters, the holding of councils, the
conferring of grants and rights and the blazing of
trails across a beaver-pelt land sometimes vaguely
referred to as Saskatchewan Country. Notably absent
from these records are the disenfranchised voices of
the Native inhabitants and other colonial minority
groups. Mackenzie's vision is to reinsert these voices
into the records—into the landscape—through
the pictorial means of painting. This echoes like the
taut, emotive pleas in the last three lines of one
of Mackenzie's poems:
aching still
for a real touch
to give me equilibrium
Mackenzie's methodology of constructing equilibrium
through the material presence of her surfaces has benefited
from, but should not be confused with, the expressionists'
appeal to the presence of action. Nor is the atmospheric
layering of her work related to the sublime in post-painterly
abstraction, or to the underlying, recurring presence
of the grid in modernist practice. Rather, Mackenzie
shatters these paradigms by ruthlessly insisting on
their coexistence—not in a tradition of painterliness,
but in an act of encrustation. It is clear she recognizes
that the complexity of her subject, of her stories,
requires an equally complex glue to hold it together.
These mapping elements weave in and out of the paintings
as drips, lines, scratches, pools. The coordinates
are words; the intersections, numbers possessing topographical
or geological specificity. But they are not literal
maps, nor literary stories. Neither are they clearly
layered; instead they form part of a molten crust that
is reconfigured with every episodic shift, filled with
humour and tragedy, full of illusion and reality, a
constant synthesis of different levels of perception
and meaning manipulating space and image.
In Tracking Athabasca "Winter Road, Diamond
Mines,” an expanse of white snowfields
or old soiled colonial riding coats is spread out
and folded, compulsively gridded. Circular irrigational
grooves are covered in snow, small trees, flowers,
river lines, large dirty thumbprints, doilies from
Britain or France, numbers, a few words—from
macro to micro, no up and no down, free falling,
free tracking. Every incident has an infinite number
of associations with Canada, both now and then. Suddenly
a loud crack from the crust of ice on a lake: spoors
of deep red paint, visible only after careful scrutiny,
speak to the cost to Native peoples, to the animals
of the land, to the immigrant minorities.
Crust: the hard brown surface of a loaf; any external
covering and coating—for instance, a crust of
snow; or geologically, the outer layer of the earth,
about 35 kilometres deep; a mantle, a scab. It is through
the cracks that we see the things we want to see, the
things that somehow we long to see, the heat of molten
passion beneath the porous crust. Mackenzie's Tracking
Athabasca is an encrustation whose subject is
the body in the land, the figured in the landscape. |