U niversity of lethbridge art gallery
ON LANDSCAPE IMAGES:
art + people = x series
BY Dr. Josephine Mills, Director/Curator, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery
There is a powerful connection between Canadian identity and landscape that has lasted from the development of Canada as an independent nation to the present. That bond is political and experiential as well as fundamentally based on visual representation. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a wave of art practice that focused on the relationship between subjectivity and forms of landscape. Connected to the cultural theory of the period that addressed ideas of speaking from the margins as well as city theories and urban policies, this work explored the
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imbrication of economics and landscape as well as race, nationality, gender and sexuality in connection with spatial practices and forms. Instead of thinking of identity as a thread or track that runs through different experiences and places, artists in the 1980s and 1990s began to explore identity in a new way. Much of the work from this period examines how specific sites produce and reproduce identity through the visual forms and the practices that occur there. As Michel de Certeau explains, “space is a practiced place” – meaning
is produced through the repeated interaction of subjects with locations. There is no area more loaded with the stakes that produce and secure social beliefs than landscape with its many permutations from urban and industrial to rural and wilderness. Yet at the same time that landscape is loaded with meaning, the genre is also inescapably beautiful and able to evoke powerful emotions. It is this interaction between aesthetics and concepts that makes landscape continually relevant and engaging for artists and viewers.
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