Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is where the great Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson occasionally lived and worked – and where, at the age of 39, he drowned. Thomson’s influence lives on in the Group of Seven, with whom he was associated, and in ‘Ghosts of Canoe Lake’, Winnipeg-born Marcel Dzama’s first exhibition in Canada in nearly a decade. Across three dozen pictures at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Dzama transplants the vision of Thomson’s and the Group’s landscapes onto our ecological reality.
Effective landscape painting beckons the viewer with nature’s majesty, and works by Thomson and the Group will transport them to the foot of a river in British Columbia or to the top of rolling mountains in Quebec. Dzama has long been captivated by Thomson’s paintings, yet here his interest seems less in landscape as a genre and more in how such exalted scenes occupy our imagination – and how the climate crisis in turn fuels a crisis of inspiration.