Dagmara Genda, Screamers and Bangers (details), 2008.

Dagmara Genda
Screamers and Bangers:
The Wallpaper Project

October 25 - November 16, 2008

Curator: Sylvie Gilbert

Artist Tour: October 25, 2 p.m.

Opening Reception: October 25, 3 – 5 p.m.

Art historians argue that since the 1930s most Canadians have learned of the Group of Seven through surrogate images: colour reproductions and silkscreen prints hanging in classrooms, school libraries, banks, homes, and doctors’ waiting rooms across the country. They have demonstrated that the broad dissemination of these images orchestrated initially through the National Gallery reproduction program, and later through the Sampson-Matthews silkscreen projects, was key in shaping our sense of what Canadian art is: Landscape painting.

Dagmara Genda is not a landscape painter. She is not even an expert on the G7. Her interest lies instead in drawing and space. However, in this new installation commissioned by the Gallery she engages the formal vocabulary of the G7, as well as the wilderness ethos expressed in much of their work.

Genda does this with the enthusiast of a reductionist. Accelerating the historical and nationalistic logic of these images, she has designed a panoramic wallpaper to be installed in a space built within the Gallery. Her design playfully merges motifs culled from iconic paintings of the G7 plus friends, with those inspired by the wildlife of Banff National Park.

With dramatic juxtapositions, Genda muddles the strong readable composition of the G7 into a grove of tangled lines and shapes. She flattens the palette of the painters to a single dramatic red colour, leaving no doubt in our mind as to the nationality of this work. Transforming the painting into patterns, she abstracts the land into a scenic representation of an unmanaged boreal forest without specific geographical location.

The iconic trees no longer stand alone. Genda has embedded animal silhouettes into their shapes, shifting the forest from its iconic status into an environment for wildlife. But are these animals fighting or copulating? Or are they clearing out, frightened by the sound of screamers and bangers, those specialized fireworks used in wildlife management? Exploiting the colour and the material of commercial signage, Genda’s wallpaper disrupts precious ecological and cultural balance. 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.