LBF at the Lake III

12 June - 14 September, 2025

Annice Fell, Jelly Green, Hélio Luis, Lizbeth Mitty, Wenhai Ning, Gaia Ozwyn, Luke Silva, Yoab Vera, Maria Kreyn and Yeji Sei Lee.

For generations the region has shaped how artists imagine the Canadian landscape, not only as scenery for Sunday painters out on Lake Algonquin, but as a space of brooding atmosphere, expansive scale, and shifting light, akin to the bohemians of Skagen in the 1880s or William Johnston’s abstract landscapes of the northern extremities of Scotland. The exhibition takes inspiration from the poetry of Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), whose writing often returns to the wetlands and waterways of the region. In her poem ‘Marshlands’, she writes: ‘The marshlands stretch away to the dim horizon’, describing a place that feels at once quiet, expansive, alive with subtle movement; a site of longing. Johnson’s lines evoke a landscape shaped by the elemental forces of wind, water, and grasses – an environment that resists clear edges or fixed viewpoints, an approach shared by many of the artists on display. The paintings in the show engage with Muskoka in both figurative and abstract ways. Some works linger on recognisable elements of the landscape – trees, shoreline, reeds, water birds, sublime bodies of water – while others translate its rhythms into gesture, diurnal or seasonal cadences, vegetal and ecological colours, and shifting fields of paint. Rather than presenting a single image of place, the works explore how landscape is encountered, often through the lens of memory, as the visual field becomes transformed by movement and the changing conditions of light and weather.

— Matthew James Holman, 2026