Amy Fung writes in this week’s Vue Weekly:
Just as the recent National Portrait Gallery show did wonders for how we can view a traditional format such as portraiture, this show begins to open up what we can justifiably call Canadian landscapes.
She discusses both Not Another Fucking Landscape and Gore, Quebec and their place in documentary and landscape traditions. Take a look.
If you didn’t pick up last week’s SEE Magazine, you missed seeing this in print:
“We think of ourselves as rugged outdoorsmen, Mounties and everything else, and we don’t think of ourselves as city folk,” starts Anthony Easton, curator of Not Another Fucking Landscape, one of two new photography exhibits opening at Latitude 53 this Friday. “We haven’t constructed an identity of urbanity, but we are. I think that we have to acknowledge urban constructions of landscape as part of our geographic core and we have to acknowledge that we aren’t survivors anymore in the Margaret Atwood sense of the word. It’s a good life we have, most of us. But it’s a life constructed almost entirely through urban existence.”
Kathleen Bell spoke to curator Anthony Easton about his show Not Another Fucking Landscape which is up right now in the ProjEx Room.
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
The other day my grandmother revealed to me how little I have learned about reading people’s artistic preferences when she visited me at my commercial gallery job. I figured that a well-dressed octogenarian with a predilection for sumptuous floral prints and afternoons spent in the garden amongst her flowers would love the delicate, elegant watercolour lily or the bombastic pinks in an electric garden on canvas.
She kept saying to me, “Carolyn, I want something restful.”
I showed her about a dozen images pulled from the back rooms before she verbalized what she really wanted in a way that I could understand:
“I want a scene.”
As she described her desire to sit in her sunroom and gaze at a space that she could travel through on the wings of her imagination, I came to realize that she wanted to buy art in preparation for her increasingly sedentary life.
Anthony Easton, curator of the upcoming Not Another Fucking Landscape left us some notes that, in his words, “look slightly like a curator’s statement”:
Because this is a show about landscape in Canada, it seems proper to begin with Margaret Atwood―her is what she says about photography and landscape:
Then, as you scan
it, you can see something in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
Read the whole thing, freshly posted on our website.
This week we’ll be sending invitations and newsletters to all of our members about our upcoming summer programming, but you can already see a few details on National Portrait Gallery, the Summer Members’ Series, the Rooftop Patio and Not Another Fucking Landscape over on our website.
Summertime is approaching, and we’re really excited about the programming we’ll be bringing. We’ve got a new newsletter at the printers this week that we’ll be sending out to all of our members, and of course we’ll be updating the website and this blog with info. In fact, there’s so much that we actually couldn’t fit it all into the newsletter. Look for:
In response to the cancellation of the “official” National Portrait Gallery, a group of Edmonton artists has put together this collection of exciting contemporary portraiture from across the country. This big show will spill into all three of our gallery spaces.
(Image: Jonathan Kaiser)
Our ever-popular rooftop patio returns with a new roster of special guest hosts and one-off cocktails.
We’ve selected four Latitude 53 Members to show their stuff in the Community Gallery for one-week installments, giving us even more to celebrate on the rooftop patio.
In August, we’ve got two shows of contemporary landscape photography. Gore, Quebec comes to us from Montreal artist Jonas St. Michael, and Not Another Fucking Landscape includes work by Edmonton’s own Zachary Ayotte, Ted Kerr, Amie Rangel and Marshall Watson, curated by Anthony Easton.
We’ll have more information and previews of these in the next few weeks—stay tuned. It’s going to be an exciting summer!
