“Conversations With Hopper,” a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Toronto-based artist Peter Harris, will open at Montreal’s Galerie d’Este on March 10.In this series of 14 oil paintings — of empty parking lots, offices, and lobbies of apartment buildings, all brightly illuminated in the midnight hours — Harris interrogates the classical distinctions between the landscape and the cityscape.The expansive, untouched majesty of nature depicted in traditional landscapes, such as those by the Group of Seven artists, stands in stark contrast to what many Canadians see every day. A large portion of the population now lives in urban environments, where towering mountains have been replaced by the clean, rectilinear lines that dominate modern architecture.“As the audience becomes more urbanized, do these artistic versions of landscape from the past still resonate in any way other than as an idealized collective memory?” Harris wrote in an email to ARTINFO. “In North America, there is a strong connection and identity to the land, and the landscape painting of the past fulfilled that desire to identify ourselves with the natural world. Many people still consider the true ‘landscape’ and landscape painting to be about the parts of the country that you visit in order to relax or as a break from daily life, without considering that the city (where 80 percent of us now live) is an essential landscape that deserves our consideration. It’s not only about reflecting to the viewer their daily lives, but exploring the capacity of a genre — landscape painting — to stay relevant to a modern audience.”Harris explicitly engages with his predecessors’ work in his own paintings by imbedding miniaturized replicas of pieces such as “Jack Pine” by Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris’s “Isolation Peak” into urban settings that are alien to their subject matter. He positions these scenes of rugged wilderness in unassuming locations, in some instances blocked partly by window panes and in others almost out of the spectator’s line of sight entirely. These formative symbols of national identity, transformed here into bourgeois ornamentation, become somewhat trivialized in these new environments, suggesting that perhaps the modern structures into which they have been subsumed are more appropriate subjects for contemporary Canadian landscapes.The study of urbanity that Harris began by interacting with these Canadian painters continues through with his dialogue with Edward Hopper. Executed in similar terms, he situates Hopper’s work in equally banal settings, such as stark hallways and unidentifiable waiting rooms.“Partly because of the lack of human presence in my work, which many viewers interpret as solitude, isolation, and tension, Hopper is a name that often is used to give some historical context to my own work,” Harris said. “In this current series, I wanted to acknowledge his precedent setting artwork, to pay homage to it, and also to offer a counterpoint to the landscape of the city which has been evolving in the 75 years since he painted his major pieces. I was struck by the idea that exploring his work in a contemporary context was my way of having a ‘conversation’ with an artist of the past, exploring their ideas and approaches to the same subject.”In a collection of brief essays titled “Hopper,” Canadian-born poet Mark Strand writes about “Nighthawks,” observing that it “is as if the light were a cleansing agent, for nowhere are there signs of urban filth. The city, as in most Hoppers, asserts itself formally rather than realistically.” The same can be said of Harris’s paintings in this series. Bearing some resemblance to Gregory Crewdson’s use of light in his meticulously staged photography, Harris employs light “to transform a scene and create a painting that [gets] people thinking anew about their surroundings,” he said.Hopper’s iconic diner scene functions to this end, as Harris hangs it on the mustard yellow walls of a brightly lit entrance to a Deutsche Bank, where windows are also a primary feature. A “No Smoking” sticker on the glass automatic door, and the door frame itself, partially block our view of this painting-within-a-painting. The image is visible enough, however, so that we can recognize the similarities between it and its new environment. While the individuals in Hopper’s painting are seemingly trapped in an exit-less diner, Harris’s recreation of the painting seems irretrievable from this foyer — which is itself a prison-like space during the day as well as at night, its automatic doors flush to the wall which, from the outside, conveys a sense that the building is hermetically sealed.This series will continue indefinitely as Harris “converses” with other artists.“Conversations with Hopper” will be on view at Galerie d’Est March 10-April 3.
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