Two Hundred Pounds Of Cement

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June 10th - July 31st 2023

at 536 Davis Street

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Barriers are everywhere in the countryside. They shape our relationship with the landscape, and our understanding of nature. 

Some barriers are intended to keep us out. Hedges, gates, barbed wire prevent us from accessing the landscape, because our curiosity might harm it or the interests of those who inhabit it.  This distance from the landscape changes our vision of it too. It remains unknowable and becomes visually abstract. In real life as in paintings, hills, from far away, appear blue. 

The other kind of barrier - windows, screens, canvases - allow us to experience the landscape but keep us detached from its physical effect. However, though the environment is not able to affect us, it does affect the barrier. When water streaks on a window, it distorts the view; when direct light hits a painting, it blocks our view. Atmospheric effects, by reminding us of the presence of the barrier, remind us that reality is both figurative and abstract at the same time. A snowdrift is on some level just a pile of hexagons.

Barriers exist in the city too, but we as city dwellers tend to notice them more in the countryside. Away from street signs and traffic lights and language, we don’t know what we’re looking at. There, reality is made of different things. Like the other barriers, this allows us to see the landscape both clearly and obscurely. Not knowing the name of a type of tree stops us from seeing the tree; knowing the name of the type of tree stops us from seeing that specific tree. We distrust it. 

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This show is an exploration of these barriers, and how our detachment from the landscape and from nature can be a way of exploring it.

Process is key to how this works. Each painting is constructed of multiple, unrelated and unplanned layers of paint. Different paintings are made on top of one another but gaps are left, or scratched away, each layer masking the last. The forms are created in reverse, from a combination of elements from different layers. We are forced to read them in ways we aren’t used to, with the near things being read last and the far things first. On closer inspection, a branch suspending snow reveals itself to be snow suspending a branch. 

The paintings all show opposites. In these works, skies have texture and form while hills have none, daylight is painted in dark colours. They are all landscapes, and yet they are (almost) all hung as portraits. Between these contradictions, we are able to catch glimpses of something real, something which is both figurative and abstract, a tree that is like any other tree, but also has its own name.

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- Text courtesy of Jack Dunleavy