LANDON MACKENZIE

Landon Mackenzie is a nationally recognized artist, admired for her large-scale paintings and works on paper. Mackenzie grew up in Toronto, where she was exposed to impressive collections of non-representational paintings which came to influence the large, vibrant, abstracted paintings she has become known for. Trained in Halifax and Montreal, she had a key role in teaching painting for three decades at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her work is held in cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Audain Art Museum. Mackenzie has received several awards for her contribution to the visual arts, including the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (2017). Landon Mackenzie is represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto.

Mackenzie’s works represent psychological and physical experiences through a vortex of spots, lines, nets, bubbles, and dots, making use of various combinations, layers, and patterns to represent the world. This work revisits an earlier series she made called Neurotransmitter, but here Mackenzie playfully engages the idea of a cross between a ski trail map and a subway diagram. Calling it Mappe Monde (Synapses), it refers to early maps that depict double hemispheres. The composition which shows a tangle of interconnected lines and dots can resemble neurons and allude to the parenthetical ‘Synapses’ in the title. They radiate out from the two centres in the canvas, creating a sense of movement and frenetic energy.