Landon Mackenzie: Recollect(s)
Landon Mackenzie: Recollect(s) is a survey of works from the artist’s 40-year career shown alongside a selection of paintings by such formidable Canadian artists as Jock Macdonald, Walter Yarwood, Harold Town, Michael Snow and Gordon Smith, assembled by her family in the late 1950s. With the inclusion of these powerful proponents of Canadian abstraction—as well as a 1912 painting by Emily Carr paired with Mackenzie’s Woo ll from 2014—the exhibition establishes a dialogue between Mackenzie and the past, highlighting their influence on her practice and her own role as mentor and professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Mackenzie grew up in an old red brick Victorian home in Toronto surrounded by her family’s stunning collection of non-representational paintings. At an early age, and with her parents’ encouragement, she frequented some of the city’s most avant-garde galleries, including the Carmen Lamanna, the Isaacs Gallery, the Here and Now, and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). She also became familiar with members of the Painters 11 artists’ collective, and her mother’s friend, Vancouver curator Alvin Balkind (who with Abraham Rogatnick founded the New Design Gallery in West Vancouver in 1955), introduced her to pictures by Gordon Smith. Other friends in this milieu included Joyce Weiland, Michael Snow, Dorothy Cameron and Harold Town, all of whom guided the teenage Mackenzie toward a sense of independence and life as an artist. In 1972 she left Toronto for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, after which she attended graduate school in Montreal, where she studied with Guido Molinari and Irene Whittome.
Landon Mackenzie’s impressive body of work includes her Lost RiverSeries, Saskatchewan Paintings (rigorous, large-format mapping paintings) and recent Particleabstractions; less well-known are her accomplished works on paper. She has been shown in over 100 exhibitions and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Vancouver Art Gallery, among others. Honoured with numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2017, she is represented by Art 45, Montreal, and Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.