Barbara Edwards Contemporary is pleased to present a BEC Lecture by Curator Mark A. Cheetham on our current exhibition, Ecologies of Landscape. The exhibition gathers work by nine renowned artists - Tacita Dean, Bonnie Devine, Olafur Eliasson, Isabelle Hayeur, Shelley Niro, James Nizam, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Simon Starling, and Paul Walde - to re-imagine our perceptual, aesthetic, and ethical relationships with our home planet. In diverse media and from a variety of cultural and geographical perspectives, these artists ponder what our connections to the Earth might be in this time of widespread concern about climate change. Especially in Canada, landscape painting has been the dominant way to approach and appreciate what we construe as 'nature' as well as our own identities. With increasing urgency since the 1960s, however, artists worldwide have grappled with the inadequacies of the landscape genre amidst concerns over land stewardship and the environmental degradation of our shared planet. Works in this exhibition reconceive land and landscape as presented and experienced in art. 

Mark A. Cheetham is the author of eleven books and volumes and numerous articles on topics including Immanuel Kant and Art History, abstract art, Postmodernism in Canada, and artist Jack Chambers. His current research focuses on ecological art and on the uses of analogy in art history. His book Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the '60s was published in early 2018. Active as a curator of contemporary and historical art, he recently curated Struck by Likening: The Power & Pleasure of Artworld Analogies at the McMaster University Museum of Art (2017). Cheetham is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a professor of art history at the University of Toronto.

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