ARTH 373 - Issues in Contemporary Canadian Art: Reinventing Landscape
- T - 15:00-17:30
- EV-1.605
- INSTRUCTOR: DR. JOHANNE SLOAN
The landscape genre is deeply embedded in Canadian art, going back to the earliest European settlers who pictured the land according to sublime or picturesque traditions. By the latter part of the 20th century, landscape art had been transformed by artists, and that reinvention continues today. Two primary issues frame the 21st-century study of landscape in Canada: the rise of Indigenous land-claims, including the insistence that their cultural survival is linked to the land; and, the ecological consequences of the Anthropocene, a term that refers to the inexorable changes to the planet caused by human activity. We will also encounter art practices and critical writings that approach landscape in other ways, by considering: the land as national territory; the land as site of raw material, resource-extraction, and wealth; the land as site of utopian dreams; the notion of an everyday, inhabited landscape; gendered landscapes; the production of technologized or digital landscapes.