Half Seen Through Interlaced Branches

In Canada, the forest is often seen as symbolic of a complex coming to terms with both a sense of place and the realization of identity. French explorers, accustomed to the well-manicured, ‘tamed’ forests of France, were confronted by the overwhelming Canadian landscape. For them and other settlers, adapting meant either surviving the woods or keeping them at bay. As such, the woods came to represent a dangerous liminal space, often reflected in Canadian literary and visual arts. half-seen through interlaced branches seeks not to group together representations of these mythical woods, but instead to offer a means of entering and subsequently negotiating them.

The exhibition groups fifteen Canadian works of art from the past fifty years to suggest the complexity of one’s relationship to place through empirical study, political and social commentary, and/or internal contemplation. It is an attempt to foreground contemporary art as knowledge production, expressing new, multiple, and divergent notions of Canadian identity. There is an inherent multiplicity in interpretations of Canadian identity and its historical link to Europe, both of which are represented here as continuously negotiated constructs. half-seen through interlaced branches suggests a Canadian art finding itself precisely by finding itself
lost in traditional depictions of Canadian woods.

Half-Seen Through Interlaced Branches was curated by the fifteen students of Dr Loren
Lerner’s Art History Graduate seminar on Nationhood & Identity. We would like to extend our gratitude to Dr. Lerner, as well as curators Nathalie Garneau and Lynn Beavis for their help in mounting this exhibition.