Shawn Evans
For a long time, I wrote landscape painting off as something quaint, something outside the urgency of the present, inundated with memories and associations of the prairie grain elevator paintings seen in my youth. It felt trite, overdone, like wallpaper to a larger conversation about contemporary art that I thought I wanted to be a part of, making the history of Canadian landscape painting invisible to me. When that changed and the inflection point happened, I began to see the work of the Group of Seven not as static monuments, but as an active and vital language—a language I had overlooked.
When I returned to the landscape, I saw it as a vehicle, a mirror, and a fractal. I started repeating it—over and over, the same trees, the same horizons, not just as a playful take on the grain elevator paintings but each painting a state of perception and more importantly a larger reflection of contemporary life. I realized that perception is never stable. Our world is built from feeds and fragments, headlines and swipes; reality is constantly reframed. In a way, painting the same landscape repeatedly became my way of processing that instability. We are all looking at the same things and yet living in completely different worlds.
The titles of these works nod toward quantum computing, where a problem exists in countless possible states before collapsing into a solution. My landscapes operate similarly: multiple versions of the same scene, layered with the possibility of infinite readings, never one definitive answer. They are about the dissonance between what is seen and what is understood, the war between perception and reality.
Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, Shawn Evans moved to Calgary to attend the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Art and Design). Since graduating in 2009, he has committed himself to a disciplined studio practice. His work is in the permanent collections of various private and public institutes, including Jim and Susan Hill (The Esker Foundation), Air Canada, The Bank of Montreal, and Field Law, Calgary. He currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.
