Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey

Landon Mackenzie is a Vancouver-based artist, admired for her large-scale works with paint on canvas. Less known are her works on paper, many in ink and watercolour, which she produces voluminously as a tandem practice to her large-scale paintings, often while traveling. Somewhere between jottings and finished works intended for public exhibition, these small paintings speak to the deepest level of human creativity. They function, at times, as glimpses into Landon Mackenzie's psyche or soul. Landon Mackenzie Parallel Journeys: Works on Paper (1975-2015) is envisaged as visually rich and elegantly designed book. Born in Boston and raised in Toronto, Mackenzie studied printmaking as an undergraduate in the era of conceptual art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. Beginning with some of her changing plate etchings made there in 1975 and included in this publication, these early layered works often featuring text, shed light on her mature painting practice, in which she often writes words and phrases into the paintings that later get obscured by marks and images. Her strengths as an artist are her inventive energy, her intellectual restlessness and curiosity, her love of imagery, maps, language and history, and her determination to keep working in the face of frowning would-be authority figures. She is able to harness her mind, emotion, body and spirit to have all systems working in tandem and firing with precision and grace. Her work is embodied, informed, poetic, expressive, and completely her own.