Visual Arts News - Fall 2019 - Landscape Materiality

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Whether it's a touch-based approach to interacting with the landscape, or using land as material, the connection to land as material is central to this issue of Visual Arts News.

Billy Gauthier's Saunituinnaulungitotluni / Byond Bone showcases his carving work in stone, whale baleen, caribou antler, and mammoth ivory in the Inuk artist and activist's first mig-career retrospective at The Rooms in St. John's. Gauthier's conection to the land is intrinsic to his work, and being gestures to this reciprocal relationship with the land as the artist honours the material.

Saint John-based KC Wilcox's work speaks to environmental concerns, and urban nature sites specifically, and how they are part of our collective and community responsibility. Wilcox's work focuses the lost purpose of a material world (fallen trees, a broken bird wing, a loose brick), object production, and how this forges our relationship with materialistic desires.

In Halifax-based Bart Vatour's "Facts About Quaking Aspen (for Graeme and Rita)," from his forthcoming collection The Truth About Facts, he writes of the trembling deciduous trees. Vatour's poetics speak to the internal and external relationship to art as materiality and meaning.

It is through their intimacy with the land, material engagement with the tides, stone, whale bone, reconnection to territory, and their relationship to flora and fauna, the artists remind us that everything is connected; we are all made of land and water.