Essay from exhibition catalogue for The Point Is? at the Kelowna Art Gallery. Group show of five artists; Pierre Coupey, Landon Mackenzie, Martin Pearce, Bernadette Phan, Bryan Ryley. 2011. Pages 20-21.

“Landon Mackenzie”
By Liz Wylie

Having worked as a painter for over thirty years, the protean Landon Mackenzie has produced a few bodies of work that live large in both the Canadian imagination and our pantheon of important and memorable works of visual art. She launched her career in 1980 with her so-called Lost River series that became almost instantly popular and well received nationally. Her stylized dog/wolf animals roamed through colourful, flatly painted, northerly landscapes, and viewers of the time, tired of the generally pallid non-colours of Minimalism, reveled in these paintings’ embrace of beauty. This initial foray was followed by work with other subjects, forming her Canadian Shield and Target paintings, which included images of the canoe, for example. Then in the early 1990s the artist began her Saskatchewan series, which are magnificent dark, gigantic, brooding paintings, multi-layered and worked with overlays and text. They were mythical readings of an imagined Saskatchewan, standing in for the vast Canadian prairie region, and its early exploration and cartography. Mackenzie’s research for the Saskatchewan paintings led to her next series, Tracking Athabaska. Strands from these paintings wound their way into her Houbart’s Hope series, from which there is an example in this show, Houbart’s Hope (Yellow) Crimson Lake, painted in 2001-4. These works are linked to the artist’s research on the early mapping of Canada. Josiah Houbart, she discovered, was the pilot for a ship under Captain Thomas Button, who explored and mapped the west coast of Hudson Bay in 1612. A body of water that seemed promising as the Northwest Passage (to
the orient) was named Houbart’s Hope in his honour. Later this was discovered to be just a river. Eventually the name was no longer placed on subsequent maps. The idea of which stories become privileged and which ones erased, as she puts it, became of great interest to Mackenzie. The painting could be read as a portion of the boreal landscape as seen from the air, and then overlaid with marks and blots and wandering lines and small circles. Eventually, the density of all this overwhelms us and we cannot tell if we are not, in fact, looking at an enlargement of something quite tiny, microscopic even.

Nights with Georgia, 2010-11, the other work in this exhibition by Mackenzie, is from her Neurocity group, which relates to her research involving the brain. In this painting a loosely formed cross painted with indistinct dark lines divides the composition very roughly into four areas. Otherwise the canvas has been treated democratically, with numerous small circles or squares in many different colours spreading randomly all over the surface. Our eye hops from like-to-like colours, unbidden, so that a dancing sort of optical rhythm is established. The space is indeterminate, as is the scale, so we have no idea if the shapes, some of which read like luminous forms, are tiny and seen up close, or huge and seen from afar. The artist says that she conceives of each shape as being a signal – which could be a thought, or a random bundle of data. Of course we are free to read the work as a completely abstract investigation of colour, but Mackenzie has specific representational ideas in mind, no matter how removed from the perceptible world they may be.

Landon Mackenzie’s mapping paintings are visually stunning, but they are less about painting and the traditions and issues within painting than they are about notions inherent in maps, especially recently, city maps, and images and ideas to do with neurology and the brain. It is with this confluence of ideas and imagery that the combination of abstraction and representation in her work begins and resides.

An image that often appears in the artist’s small watercolours that she produces almost daily, especially when travelling, is a roughly ovoid shape, usually on its side. My reading of this is as of the primal or ultimate self, like a pre-cognitive conception/rendering representing the feeling of being, of being alive, having a brain and mind in a body, a self. The same sort of reading works for me in looking at her gigantic paintings. Over the last couple of decades, Mackenzie’s trajectory has changed, from at first creating something fictional, to then mapping an imagined past, to ultimately turning her gaze inward, cerebrally, in terms of neurology and the life of the brain.