Background
Landon Mackenzie was born in 1954 in Boston, Massachusetts. Although neither of her parents were artists, both were active in the cultural life of Toronto, where Mackenzie grew up. The writers, artists, and thinkers who visited the house were, "trying to define Canadian national identity, politically and culturally." Mackenzie recalls her family had a particular involvement with the Painters 11 and the artists associated with the Isaacs Gallery. The effect was manifold: cutting-edge art was fully integrated into Mackenzie’s upbringing and sensibility; notions of Canadian-ness were actively discussed; marriage, motherhood and social conformity were never seen as ultimate goals. Both parents offered her the message "You can do what you want." Mackenzie’s great-grandmother and grandmother were also painters.
Education
Landon took her university training at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1972 - 1976 and at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, during 1976 - 1979.
Career
Mackenzie began her art career studying printmaking, in particular, etching. She would carve into a copper plate and print her design, then she would carve into it again and print again. She would repeat that process indefinitely until she had a series of individual works from one plate. This idea of layering is carried over to her large textural luminously colored paintings. While she is interested in a place, Mackenzie isn’t concerned with real images of places but more with imaginary ideas related to place.
Landon Mackenzie has been a practicing artist for thirty years. Starting as a student in 1972, Mackenzie has built an impressive body of work and is probably best known for her large-format mapping paintings. In 1986, she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia and has taught at the Emily Carr School of Art and Design since that time. In her large abstract paintings, she explores ideas about the physical and social geography of Canada, Canadian heritage and the Canadian identity.
In several of her large-scale paintings from the early 90's to 2009, Mackenzie layered research notes, annotated maps, archival texts and documentation of her investigations and explorations of geographic regions. The most recent of these works is "Vancouver As the Centre of the World" commissioned for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. She is particularly interested in current research on the brain and neural mapping in relation to the mapping of our physical environment leading to recent series "Neurocity" and "The Structures", some of which were the subject of a five-year survey exhibition in 2011 at The Richmond Art Gallery in Canada. Often her work hovers in both regions of abstract and representational art.
Her work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musee d’art Contemporain de Montreal among others. She has received numerous awards and grants and is an active painter and educator within the Canadian art community. In addition to her teaching, Mackenzie currently maintains studios in Vancouver and Prince Edward Island.
Views
The idea of information overload is central to Mackenzie’s work, creating paintings that have no point of rest, no place where the eyes can settle. A reaction to the fast-paced information-driven world, making, either as a painting or a drawing, is a way for Mackenzie to process an endless stream of information, history, and stories.
Quotations:
"I hate sketching. I don’t want to work outdoors. I’ve always made landscapes from looking into imaginative space."
“My process itself is abstract – a flash act of momentary decision-making; I trust my instinct. The final outcome one might say is representational, but a representation of phenomena we don’t actually have pictures for in the world.”
“Finishing is recognizing – you recognize something that doesn’t exist yet in the world.”