Marcel Dzama captures the glory of the Prairies in Ghosts of Canoe Lake at Contemporary Calgary

We cannot abandon such beauty is one of the landscapes on display in Contemporary Calgary's new exhibition Ghosts of Canoe Lake, featuring the work of Marcel Dzama

France has its water lillies. Holland has sunflower seeds. LA. has its David Hockney-infused swimming pools swelling with magic hour alienation.

Now, Western Canada has Ghosts of Canoe Lake.

That’s the name of the new exhibition of work by New York-by-way-of-Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama, which opened Thursday night at Contemporary Calgary and runs through late October.

Dzama’s idiosyncratic Prairie-infused landscapes will be on display in the new exhibition, which references the impact of climate change in works such as We cannot abandon such beauty, and pays homage to one of Canada’s greatest landscape artists, Tom Thomson in Waiting on Tom’s ghost.

He grew up in Winnipeg and studied at the University of Manitoba, where he was part of the Royal Art Lodge, a group of young artists who put Winnipeg on the radar of the art world.

The works on display in Ghosts of Canoe Lake were inspired by the Saskatchewan and Manitoba wilderness, where Dzama grew up.

“As a youth when my worries and problems felt heavy, I would walk out past the Perimeter Highway of the city (Winnipeg) into the Prairie night, and that night sky was so unfathomably vast and beautiful, it humbled me to the bone,” he said. “I wanted to visit that feeling with these paintings.”

Artist Marcel Dzama's exhibition Ghosts of Canoe Lake is running at Contemporary Calgary through Oct. 27

What makes a Dzama landscape unique is that there’s another story going on under the first story, the one where nature is beautiful and ethereal and untouched.

"Through a pageantry of satirical characters, the exhibition touches upon themes of wildfires and climate change, global political unrest and displacement of peoples, social polarization and the persecution of difference,” says curator Kanika Anand, in a release.. “It is a timely exhibition that offers a sense of both nostalgia and hope, while also leaving room for the curious and mysterious.”

 

 

 

 

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Since moving to New York, Dzama’s work has found its way into public and private collections around the world, at places like Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, MOMA and Le Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal. He’s also a favourite of celebrity collectors including Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey and Steve Martin.

Ghosts of Canoe Lake runs through Oct. 27 at Contemporary Calgary, then move on to Plug-In Art in Winnipeg.

For more about Contemporary Calgary, go here.