Lake Wabagishik 1928

Editor: We're looking at Franklin Carmichael's "Lake Wabagishik" from 1928, rendered in oil paint. There’s a palpable tension in the air, a stillness before a storm perhaps. What strikes you most when you look at this piece? Curator: What I see is a very deliberate construction of Canadian identity being presented to a changing world. Carmichael was part of the Group of Seven, after all. And they were consciously forging a national aesthetic. But who was included, and who was excluded, in that vision? Look at the landscape itself. Editor: How so? Curator: Think about the Canadian landscape tradition itself: how is it tied to colonialism, resource extraction, and the erasure of Indigenous presence? The ‘untouched wilderness’ Carmichael portrays is a myth. Where are the stories and rights of the Anishinaabe, whose territory this is? Isn't that erasure a political act, then and now? What responsibility do we have when viewing these landscapes today? Editor: So, even a seemingly serene landscape painting like this can be seen as having a deeper, more complex relationship to history and power? Curator: Precisely! We need to challenge the narratives presented to us, including in art. Considering the social and historical contexts helps us unpack the politics embedded within. Editor: I hadn't thought about it that way. I’m going to be thinking about landscape paintings differently from now on. Curator: That’s the idea. Art invites questioning, not just passive viewing.