The McIntyre Ranch Project

On May 29 to June 5th of 2004, eighteen artists, sculptors, photographers and writers from an across Canada spent a week working, and mingling at the spectacular McIntyre Ranch in southern Alberta. The ranch, located in the Milk River Ridge area of Alberta on a height of land the waters of which flow to the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, and Arctic oceans, is a 55,000-acre ranch, and contains the largest area of pristine native grasslands in western North America. 

This "residency" provided the artists with the opportunity to relate with the landscape and with Alberta ranch culture. 

While the ranch and its location was the inspiration for this project, the artists have been given complete freedom to interpret the landscape and the experience as they wish, and in the medium that they choose, which will likely result in art works as disparate and unusual as the artists themselves. 

The participants, all prominent and internationally recognized artists, writers, filmmakers, and critics, come from New York to Vancouver.

Eighty-seven square miles of rare short grass prairie, two or three buffalo jumps. monumental hoodoos. 8000 Red Angus, a gracious, ranch home of 1914 vintage, (followed by a stately horse barn in 19151), all located ·in the blustery Milk River Country. 

Home of the Assiniboine and Blackfoot. In a period of 150 years, five colonizing nations – Spain, France, United States, Britain, and Canada – claimed ownership of this barley known terrain. 

In June of 2004, fourteen visual artists, four writers and a CBC television crew traveled to the McIntyre Ranch deep in southwestern Alberta. Established in 1894 by William H. McIntyre Sr., the ranch was later acquired by the Thrall family who, three generations later, continue to leave the land largely undisturbed, allowing its native grasses to sustain the herds year-round. More recently, the  Mclntyre home has become a kind of haven for extra-curricular projects and collegiums. Those who visit often come from highly-urbanized or settled areas and can be jolted by what is for many, an alien geography. Overwhelming in scale, and disorienting in its lack of the familiar.  

That sensation awaited many of the established artists and writers who came that week in June to explore, digest and do research for a work of art, a piece of writing or, in the case of the CBC crew, some usable footage. Gathered from locales as diverse as Montreal and Lethbridge and as far-away as Halifax and West Grove. Pennsylvania, the Participants toured unsentimentally-named ranch yards and sites like Jimmy's Camp, Buffalo Jump, Branding Corrals and North Chief Field. It was truly a case of ‘what you see is what you get', and all through the week, as artists and writers struggled to make sense of a place that is both romantic in a historical and environmental context and precarious as a modern-day business, there was a recognition that creating work for the forthcoming exhibition would be a different kind of challenge for all. Contemporary art practice is far removed from the descriptive model that produced a Frederic Remington or a Charlie Russel and although Wallace Stegner wrote beautifully about this region, that was then and this is now.

But as much as the fish-out-of water theme was in the air, the hospitality of the Thralls and the cowboys was endearing, the determination of organizer David Durrant amazing, and for an experienced bunch of artists and writers (many with national reputations), the McIntyre Ranch was nothing if not an out-of-the-ordinary opportunity to re-represent or distill the ranching experience in contemporary words, images and objects. In this exhibition, we can see what was made out of such a boundless place.  

Artists: Raymond April, Chris Cran, Gord Ferguson, John Goodman, Katherine Govier, Angela Grauerholz, Faye Heavysheild, Mary-Beth Laviolette, Billy J. McCarroll, Jim Macquarrie, Sandra Meigs, Robert Murray, Robert Finley, Judith Schwarz, Jeffrey Spalding, Aritha Van Herk, Robert Youds, Tim Zuck