North by Northeast: Contemporary Canadian Painting

The title of the exhibition riffs on the central premise of mistaken identity in the plot of Hitchcock’s 1959 film, North by Northwest, and the show queries what comparisons might be observable in these artists’ formal language. Depicting subjects in fantastical or dreamlike settings, many of the works displayed boast a keen sense of the tragicomic — bodies present as dislocated or incomplete yet assertive of their own desire. Similarly, the natural world is rendered as surreal, occasionally a prop, and at other times, a constructed mise-en-scene. Akin to the landscape painters of the “Group of Seven” before them, these artists share the formative experiences of Canada’s natural landscapes. The artists included have each carved rigorously conceptual practices, playing with the country’s canonical investment in representational traditions. Furthermore, the presentation speaks to a long history of cross-pollination between the US, where many of these artists now reside, and the major art centers of Canada.