Landon MacKenzie Interview
Excerpt Two
» View movie
I think 8 to 10 Saskatchewan paintings and they, they’re all 7 foot 6 inches high and 10 foot 3 inches long which is the idea that there is just a, a space whatever I can reach from my little stools and then they’re like a manuscript or a map. And I, I was thinking of how Canada doesn’t really have a legacy of history paintings and yet we’re in such a complicated time about thinking about history and whose history’s valid and which history comes on the page before the next history and just the, the tangles that language gets us into in this particular time of, of, of revealing and, and not always revealing nice things. Uhmmm I thought that painting was a really good, good possibility for that, that, this work because you could avoid some of the problems of language where the, the, the, the page is organized with first and second paragraph and therefore certain kinds of things stand out or priorities. And how do you take, so that painting that’s, that’s in the show is how to take a First Nation’s experience and a settler’s experience and a contemporary understanding of how the layers are formed.
How little we, we actually as Canadians know about how those layers are and, and how to we access them and how then we think about landscape. I mean so many Canadians, you know, think about painting. They think landscape painting is just part of our uhhh not as (*inaudible) in the professional arts, but certainly in the lay person’s arts. And it felt like it was important to continue the work that I’ve been doing, but to destabilize that, but also make them, you know, visually enticing. I don’t want a painting to be didactic and have a, a, a point to it. Like the viewer has to be able to enter the work and sort it out themselves.
|
