NANCY LOWRY - Making Strange
Reception: Saturday, December 3, 2pm
December 3 – December 31
Art Placement is pleased to present this latest exhibition by Nancy Lowry, an artist who is part of a younger generation tackling the great national tradition of landscape painting. Their unconventional interpretations challenge tradition as a productive and revitalizing strategy that seeks to bring fresh perspective to a familiar and beloved subject. Lowry often prefers to use the term “paintscape” to describe her works, which teeter on the fulcrum between landscape and abstraction. Often intimately scaled, her paintings have a powerful material presence in the heavily-tooled surfaces, strong gestural marks and bold use of colour.

How do you make a contemporary landscape painting? For Lowry, the answer has been to take the opposite approach: to make paintings that do not look like landscape paintings at all. The usual tell-tale signs of the landscape genre are often absent: no discernible horizon, no green and blue "landscape" palette, no forms or focal points that are immediately recognizable as "tree" or "shore" or "cloud". With wildly inventive colour, and lines and gestures that echo nature but also stand alone as abstract elements within each picture, it is sometimes surprising to find out that these pictures are, in fact, landscapes. But they absolutely are landscape paintings, albeit as glimpsed under extraordinary circumstances: a misty forest interior as it might appear through half-closed eyes; the placid surface of a lake on a nearly pitch black night when it’s almost impossible to distinguish water from land or air; a field and sky both glowing crimson red when the setting sun reaches just the right angle. The landscape remains Lowry’s inspiration, but she does not want to give it back to us as a literal translation. Instead, she gives us something entirely new: her vision of the subject as seen, digested, and transformed--tradition made unfamiliar, the familiar made strange.

Nancy Lowry was born in Toronto and has lived in Saskatoon since she was a child. She first started painting the landscape during a teen workshop at Emma Lake. After studying liberal arts, painting, and drawing at the U of S, she completed a BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2003. She has also participated in numerous workshops and residencies throughout North America including the Emma Lake Artists' Workshop, which she also went on to organize. Her works have been exhibited in public and commercial galleries throughout Canada.

Installation Images: