While countless Canadian artists have been influenced by the Group of Seven, Dagmara Genda has been inspired by the Group of Seven’s secondary market – the silkscreen prints and colour reproductions on calendars and framed in bank offices and school classrooms across the country. In a solo show at The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery, opening October 25 and preceded by a tour led by the artist, Genda brings that creative spark to a large-scale installation work, created in-situ.
Titled Screamers and Bangers: The Wallpaper Project, Genda’s work journeys into Canadian landscape and discovers a wild place full of shape-shifting creatures clashing with civilization. Silhouetted in stark red, the limbs of the iconic jack pine incorporate outlines of Banff wildlife, merging motifs that mix the order of landscape painting with the chaos of what’s hidden in the trees.
“Exploiting the colour and the material of commercial signage, Genda’s wallpaper disrupts precious ecological and cultural balance,” says Sylvie Gilbert, senior curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery. “The installation is at once a garden, a protected space, a cosmology of chaos where mythical images and wild animals bloodily battle out their protected status.”
A recent MFA graduate of the University of Western Ontario, Dagmara Genda has had solo shows at London, Ontario’s Artlab, and at the Off-Ice Gallery in Winnipeg. She has participated in group shows including The 1950 Ford Show at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, The Emerging Landscape at Calgary’s Nickle Arts Museum, and most recently, Material Girl at the Harbinger Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario.
