Making the first selection

Cam begins his consideration of the prints that are stored in Solander box #6. It just so happens they are all by the same artist, Hugh Mackenzie.

Mackenzie is a Canadian artist, who's practice swings between figurative and industrial abstractions. This self described painter-etcher, also retired from a long career as an art educator. Mackenzie taught at Ontario Collage of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, H.B. Beal Secondary School, the London Public Library and Art Museum, and interestingly for the Sarnia Art Association, in 1966.

In a Curatorial Smackdown, the first choice is often the most difficult because there is no real framework within which to make your decision. Other than maybe the color of the walls, the other exhibition in the gallery or the piece you react to the most intensely, either positively or negatively.

Solander box #6 contained several small prints of differing examples of Mackenzie's reoccurring content. Two figurative prints stood out among the others, Cam chose a small aquatint (5 1/16" x 3 11/16") entitled Seated Figure, 2001. Seated Figure illustrates Mackenzie's use of contrast and ability to carve out a figure that embodies its own emotive abstraction, as the lines that make the image hold the emotion of the figures posture.

This relationship between image and process is described by Andrea Green, a student of Mackenzie's, who wrote the essay in our catalogue for a show titled The Etchings of Hugh Mackenzie in the Collection of Gallery Lambton. Unfortunately the catalogue contains no dates for the show, but Cam gathered from Gallery staff that it was somewhere between 2002 and 2005. In the catalogue essay, Green sources years of letter correspondence and presents it as a personal letter, addressed to her a mentor, Mackenzie. She admires,

“In your new affinity for light, you discovered energy and found the immateriality of matter and the ability to disolve substance. I can think of no more difficult alchemy than to coax light out of zinc, yet your action on the etching plate produces this transmutation.”

There's an irony, but also a logical progression, to hanging this first selection in the same gallery as the just closed ArtOP: Gallery Lambton's Instructors Show. Smack Down II is turning out to be a very educational experience.