This is an abridged version of my reception speech, it is slightly different than the video discussion:
So what is this exhibit all about - beside three years of my life? In taking on this challenge of placing myself and my artwork amongst the history of art making in London, Ontario, Canada with that specific focus on landscapes I am placing myself within a certain lineage that I have defined as a historical line from Homer Watson, through the Group of Seven, to the London Regionalists, to finally myself - the next in the lineage of London’s Regionalist as its champion and current purveyor. Within this historical line runs this thread of origin and from that original.Throughout this investigation - I explored the tools and methodologies within various London Regionalist Artists’ whose work I have staked claim to as well as how I have moved on to build upon these tools to develop my own form of London Regionalism with an emphasis on deconstructed language and imagery, materialism and found objects, experience and memory and in this, continuing to move London’s Regionalist Tradition forward - or perhaps to its logical conclusion.
My artistry has benefited from this historical lineage. So how have I benefited from London’s Regionalism? From Bernice Vincent I found the beauty, both complex and simplified, in her explorations of everyday life. Over time I have found we shared a passion for a full colour palette. From Greg Curnoe - letters, words, text - both as a narrative of London as well as a tool. It is from the inspiration of Curnoe that I started putting the title on the face of my work, and singing my name in block letters. Also because of the many historical artworks that can not be attributed because the artists signature is illegible - and therefore with limited value. Then there’s Curnoe’s belief that great and critically defined artworks could be produced in London by artist who had chosen to live here. Paterson Ewen and Murray Favro have had a significant influence on my work as constructionists. In reference to Murray Favro, Curnoe writes that “He just builds things,” (Curnoe & Reed, 1984, p. 30). I like the simplicity of that as one who also “just builds things.” This exhibit is the result of that effort!Throughout this exhibition, many of these influences are here. I also believe that each artwork can stand on its own as ‘original’ as in my own form of originality. In this then, my regionalism, these experiences and subsequent output come from me, my ideas and my fingers, in London and often with materials and objects coming from within 100 feet of my home, or on my travels. I like many London artists, have utilized “the depiction of subjects drawn from a limited geographical area,” (Nixon, 1987, p. 34) specifically places I have walked. In that, as a body of work rather than a series of individual accomplishments, it has grown beyond mere landscape to addressing the ecology or “the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment,” (Merriam-Webster.com), real and imagined. My goal is that they can be experienced “conceptually, kinetically, and visually” in “dynamic modernist languages” and that they appear “authentically ecological.” That these images are more than “just a place on the map.” They are authentically produced as a result of “self-reflection and critique” from “personal and local experiences” for the most part, and are a “phenomenon” and “interesting objects” in themselves. Within the journey there is growth also, as a person, artist, and in the dialogue moving from images of the land to engaging critically with landscape’s ideological and semiotic construction. At the beginning of this journey through Southwestern Ontario’s history and relationship to the landscape genre I challenged myself to respond within London’s Regionalist Tradition. Can I make claim to the entire landscape genre? Hardly, but I can to its universality as a way of communicating and challenging the status quo of our local ecology. Furthermore, while I have drawn from the artists of my history, from Homer Watson, through the Group of Seven, to the London Regionalists, I believe I can make that claim to Curnoe’s “oregionaI” as that next in the lineage of London’s Regionalist as its champion and current purveyor, following Jamelie Hassan.In closing, I’ll offer these words of Homer Watson who often argued that “every familiar scene is hallowed with a glamour which gives a charm the attractions of a strange land can never give, and he paints it with a soul,” (Foss, 2018, p. 62). In 1934, 90 years ago, Homer Watson in a letter to “the Rt. Hon. Mackenzie King” wrote: “I feel, more should be looked for and searched out in the forms and textures of nature in order to bring out a revelation of its infinity which is, in my estimation, the duty and joy of the landscape painter,” (Miller, 1988, p. 134). This has been a joyful journey. Thank you!