Terrene

Taken From Exhibition Catalogue: 

Terrene is the first one-person, curated exhibition of the work of Jeffrey Burns, an artist and teacher at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. The exhibition offers audiences a sustained look at this artist’s production over a period of several years, while the accompanying catalogue, with research and essays by Linda Jansma and Shauna McCabe, suggests the complex conceptual and formal underpinnings of his work and provides a context for its viewing.  

To even the casual observer, it is clear that Jeffrey Burns is interested in, perhaps even obsessed with, landscape. Audiences to the exhibition will find a rich context within both contemporary and historical landscape painting, and will discover extended possibilities for discussion about this preeminent Canadian idiom. The work also references recent critical explorations of the meanings of landscape – as part of the nature/culture dichotomy, and as central to the debate surrounding ecology, technology, science, tourism, and the politics of nature through the merging of microcosm and macrocosm, science and industry, plant with human. As importantly, perhaps, these works explore the lived, human experience, operating as interior landscapes relating to human anxiety and psychological states of being.  

Terrene is a cooperative venture, organized and overseen by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery with the support of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Harcourt House Gallery, the Owens Art Gallery, and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. All five partners were interested in combining resources for the presentation of Jeffrey Burn’s work in a national context, and were committed to the production of this important, first publication on his art. We are grateful for the opportunity to form this partnership and to present the paintings of Jeffrey Burns to our communities