Light plays a definitive role in Leslie Reid’s work: it veils, pales out, obscures or illuminates in intense highlight and shadow as the artist explores a sense of place through landscape. For this retrospective, curator Diana Nemiroff selected 23 paintings from across four decades, organizing them around themes ever present in Reid’s work: air, earth and water. The elegant installation first drew viewers to Reid’s earliest works from the mid-1970s, such as the large-scale Calumet Island (1975), where barely perceptible gradations of pale colour evoke mist or the skies above the Ottawa River. These works were juxtaposed with her 2011 Cape Pine series, in which a Newfoundland coastal landscape rendered in faint pinks and greys emerges from atmospheric fog. The exhibition traced a chronological trajectory around Carleton’s L-shaped gallery, along which the paintings became darker in palette and feeling before arriving at Reid’s present work.
Born and now based in Ottawa, Reid has long photographed the landscapes in which she finds herself. She projects images onto the canvas, methodically layering paint in the luminescence of the projected image to transpose the effects of natural light and psychological sense of place. Her training as a printmaker (and painter) is evident in earlier works, in which she applied colours singly using subtle masking techniques to create the effect of diffuse light while depicting landscapes ranging from Canada to France, from California to England. The effect is reminiscent of a daguerreotype, particularly where the use of wax mutes colours, as in Cantley IV (1991). Though the relationship of photography to painting could be missed in the earlier images, works from the later 1990s and 2000s—when figures appear—reveal a close relationship with the medium, as the contrast of light and dark intensifies, suggesting backlighting or photographs at midday. The mood turns disquieting as her palette deepens and the subjects become Reid’s children, typically in the water at a summer property in Cantley, Quebec. As Nemiroff outlines, Reid’s “darkening vision” refers less to her colour choice than to the recognition of our precarious place within the natural world. In Cantley: Wings (2000), the figure, featured in shadow against the stark halo of a splash, fuses with the dark-blue water. Five video works—a new medium for Reid—explore the simultaneous familiarity and otherness of landscape as she walks through the Calumet, Quebec, property of childhood summers and at Cape Pine, where she did residencies in 2008 and 2009. Returning to the recent Cape Pine paintings, the viewer is positioned as if looking down a barely discernible road, the fog palpable, as air, earth and water meld together into a vast unknown.
This is a review from the Spring 2012 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, please visit its table of contents.
