Liss, David. “Landon Mackenzie: When Worlds Collide” Essay in Landon Mackenzie – Parallel Journey: Works on Paper. A 192 page full colour book covering 1975 to 2015, with four essays on Mackenzie’s rarely seem works on paper. Black Dog Publishing, London UK, 2014. Pages 69-72.

I am a part of all that I have met.

– Alfred Lord Tennyson

I first became aware of Landon Mackenzie’s work during my time as a painting and printmaking student at Concordia University in the 1980s as she was gaining considerable attention for her Lost River Series of paintings. Our careers and our lives have overlapped across time, geography and circumstance ever since. As we both work in the visual arts in Canada this may not be particularly unusual, but with Landon such coincidences are full of meaning, and perhaps are not coincidences at all. Since the mid-1990s her paintings are very much about the complex network and interconnectivity between her personal history, Canadian history and geography, and her relationships and connections to people and places in Canada and around the world. Her art is about her journey and her experience as a person, as an artist, as a wife and mother, as an influential teacher, as a peripatetic traveller. Though the names, the dates, the places and the stories embedded in her work are specific to her life, Landon’s journey runs parallel to all of ours. Her art reflects the experience of being human; of life lived and of being alive.

While each of our journeys are personal and run parallel to others, there are many aspects of our lives that we share; that connect us to one another, physically, psychologically, historically, socially, culturally and geographically. Like a Venn diagram, Landon’s work suggests and examines those connections, those occurrences of logic and probability; those

serendipitous places where experience overlaps. And so it is that Landon’s and my journeys and histories have overlapped.

Both Landon and I were raised in southern Ontario, she in Toronto, I only 45 minutes down the road in Hamilton. We both attended art school at Concordia University in Montreal, although several years apart, and we did not know each other back then, despite living only streets away for a short period of time. However, during my time as an installer and assistant curator in charge of the collection of the Concordia Art Gallery (now the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery) her painting Lost River Series #3, 1981, in the collection became one of my

favourites. It is a large, dark canvas with an isolated animal figure that I interpreted as empathetic to the plight of nature, which resonated strongly with me. As her career was rising within the context of New Image Painting that was ascendant at the time, I began to follow her work and her practice with great interest.

I first met Landon many years later in 1996, while on assignment writing art reviews for the Montreal Gazette. I was sent to interview her for her solo exhibition at René Blouin’s adjunct gallery space in the Belgo Building. Young as I was at the time, I’ll admit now to my lack of unbiased journalism: I was meeting one of my favourite ‘big name’ Canadian artists, the painter of Lost River Series #3! Anyone who knows Landon can attest to her immediate warmth and friendly charm, and she also appeared to have just as much genuine interest in my life as I had in hers, especially once I mentioned that I was an artist. With the business of her exhibition taken care of, we moved on to discuss other artists whom we knew and admired, discovering that we were both good friends with Canadian-born, New York artist Medrie MacPhee. Less than a year later, in my capacity as Director and Curator of the Gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, I had agreed to host a travelling exhibition of Medrie’s work with an additional exhibition of recent work at René’s adjunct space. During the course of that project, at the exhibition’s debut at the Charles Scott Gallery in Vancouver, Medrie, Landon and I were giving a walk and critiques together for the students at the Emily Carr Institute of Art+Design.

But going back to Montreal in 1996, and only several months after Landon’s show, I was sent by Gazette to cover the annual international painting symposium in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, where Landon was participating as the designated Canadian project leader. Here we discovered our mutual love of watercolour painting and spent a session painting on the north shore of the St Lawrence River.

Sometime after Baie-Saint-Paul Landon excitedly informed me that her work was being included in the exhibition of Canadian women artists in Taipei, Taiwan. Less than a year later, and out of the blue, I was invited to curate an exhibition of contemporary Canadian art, on the not-unexpected theme of landscape, at the Kaoshiung Museum of Fine Arts in the south of Taiwan. Seeking an approach that might expand the stereotypical associations with Canadian landscape painting, I included three of Landon’s large-scale paintings. Travelling to the show with a contingent of participating artists all suffering from jet lag, we ended up on the balcony of my hotel suite at five o’clock each morning engaged in watercolour painting sessions with the supplies that both Landon and I carried on the trip. For several years afterwards the two of us mailed watercolour pads and sketchbooks back and forth, drawing into, painting over, or just leaving-be each other’s images.

Over the years since then, Landon and I have encountered each other on numerous occasions in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, New York, Venice, London, Madrid and elsewhere, often in uncanny and unexpected moments and places. By now we laugh when this happens, and have shared many stories on our career in the art world, our children and family lives, and our friends, and we continue to discover people, places and experiences that we have in common. These crossing of paths, interweaving stories and relationships are the stories and histories that make up Landon’s life; that have influenced and informed her identity, and that are the raw material and conceptual framework from which she has constructed her paintings and works on paper since the mid-1990s.

In Landon’s Gabriel’s Crossing to Humboldt, 1995, and Interior Lowlands (Still The Restless Whispers Never Leave Me), 1996, from the Saskatchewan Paintings, fragments of drawn maps and handwritten text emerge partially visible form beneath layers of acrylic paint, amidst topographic surfaces that might resemble agricultural fields punctuated with dark areas of deep, foreboding space. Freak Weather Patterns off Hudson’s Bay, 1998, like many of the large-scale paintings from this era, refers in its title to specific geographic territories, historical events and climatic phenomena. During this period the content of her works, particularly the Tracking Athabasca series, was derived from her research in various archives and on her travels, as she familiarized herself with the histories, legends and mythologies, and the people and the places of the various regions in northwestern Canada where she spent time. Immersive in scale, densely loaded with pulsating, vibrant colour, these pictures feel sensorial, sensual and alive. They embody rich narratives that combine historical record and personal fact and fictions woven together in an imagistic tapestry that connects the artist and her stories, her experience and her identity to a larger context where external and internal realms meet and overlap.

During the early 2000’s Landon developed a neurological disorder that remained undiagnosed for some time, though was possibly linked to her decades of exposure to paints, solvents and other chemicals common to her practice. While undergoing examinations and treatments she noticed similarities between the complex geographically-inspired patterns and networks in her paintings and the intricate patterns of the brain made visible through medical scans. Within her own visual lexicon she saw these as mappings of the brain that contained not only information required to function but also visceral matter: the arteries and nerved that are conduits carrying memory, experience and that determine spatial cognition and behaviour, that essentially define who we are as humans and who we are as individuals.

At this point she became inspired by physical anatomy and began to turn inward, literally, for source material as reflected in her Hobart’s Hope series or The Structures, such as the paintings World of Knots and Troubles from 2006, Wild Red, from 2008, through (Spin) Otis and Ash from 2010, and Neurocity (Aqua Blue), 2012, in which line, shape and form more closely resemble arteries, connective tissue, nerves, blood vessels and synapses. The ambience of these pictures feels more biological than geographical, more map of inner physical territory—the corpus callosum—than terrestrial topography. And the brain also encompasses the ephemeral, nebulous territories of the mind; the locus of consciousness and imagination; of thoughts, memories and dreams; implications of the metaphysical. Optically charged, kaleidoscopic surfaces of paintings such as Night Sky and Blue Moon, 2009, depict the infinite universe; territories of the celestial realm. The perceptual act of looking is transformed in the brain, in the mind’s eye, igniting the infinite potential of the imagination.

In Landon’s work the constellations of a night sky, the roads, train tracks and waterways articulated on a map, the nerves, blood vessels and arteries of the brain, are all laden with narratives that can be understood as analogous to the commonalities of experience, to the overlap and mutability of our parallel journeys that connect us to one another, whether we know Landon personally or only through her pictures.