CLICK HERE TO VIEW PROJECT

Silo: Re-Picturing the Landscape

The foundation of my art practice and creative research explores the relationships between Environmental Sciences, the landscape and issues bordering abstraction and representation. Within that framework I pose questions concerning identity, place, ancestral origin, religion and relational abstraction.

The project Silo – Repicturing the Landscape will be comprised of 40 abstract paintings inspired by personal experiences of western Canadian landscapes combined with intellectual questioning of the immediate physical and distant immaterial environments. Silo will include two different but related bodies of work entitled the Field and Canal and Revolution Series, which are ongoing investigations of the connections between self-similarity in material structures, the geomorphology of painting and the relationship of humanity’s mark upon the land.  The project also explores ancient ideograms and iconography, which evoke the ancestry and immaterial structures within environmental/urban spaces.

Concerning the examination of immediate physical and distant immaterial environments, research trips will be taken (through the duration of this project) to various locations in western Canada over a one year period for the purpose of gathering preparatory material. This material will be photographic and drawing based in nature and will be used as starting points in the development of this project. The locations will be sites of land reclamation such as old architectural  spaces (abandoned structures, mines, homesteads etc.), agricultural land that is being shifted back to original states, and major human infrastructure that is slowly disappearing. I’m also interested in visiting current major geometric incursions in the landscape such as large-scale mining, agricultural grain depots and irrigation canals. Some confirmed locations are Fort McMurray Alberta’s mining industry-footprint, Yorkton Saskatchewan’s historical farming architecture and the Okanagan’s pre-1950’s irrigation canals.
The main objective of this project will be to further develop my visual language concerning abstractions relationship with representation and to find new artistic territory for the landscape tradition to exist. The main obstacle will be to combine landscape pictorial conventions with current pluralistic modes of abstraction.