Landon MacKenzie Interview
Excerpt Three
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And then there’s various maps of Assiniboia layered and positioned and proportioned and predominantly uhhh the Carlton Trail is available at the end, but it is also available at the beginning. And uhhh and then I, you did some research on the telegraph trails. They’re really not, they’re not visible sort of in the, the work as they are no longer visible to us. So the paintings are quite reformative. I, though I work on several at once I don’t try to finish them for months and months and months. I start off on the floor and I remember with that painting you laid out all the research and you’ve got all these things and you’re working out quite intuitively between the material and this kind of project of discovery and then the project of painting. And by living in them I, I get away from some of the aesthetic conventions that we, we get caught by which is how to organize this, this, this and that. It allows you to do the one inch by one mile grid using Xeroxing. I, I, I took hundreds of slides from the archives and then ran them through a Xerox, old-fashioned Xerox machine that would receive a slide and make me a working copy.
And by looking at maps that went from 1800 in and then I went up to Saskatoon and looked at all their maps too. And I’ve been to the Polar Research Station at Cambridge and the National Archives here. You start to see the maps from 1800 which is the earliest one at the Saskatchewan Archive of, of the area and it’s just a few field notes. It’s just about some willow and some animal life and some rocky sand and some this and that. It’s very sparse. But by ’57 when you had Palliser (**phonetic) come through, the project of Saskatchewan is really from ’57 to, to the First World War. And the tracking paintings go a hundred years further back and this is from Oubart’s (**phonetic) out which is a hundred years back further than that on Hudson Bay.
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