Richard Fung: Landscapes at McMaster Museum of Art

I’ve been making a habit of attending Thursday afternoon critiques for McMaster University’s Studio Art program, and managed to bonus up this week with the opening of Richard Fung’s Landscapes at the McMaster Museum of Art, as well as an Artist’s Talk earlier in the afternoon on the background of Fung’s practice leading into his current video installation merging Turner’s etchings of the English countryside with their Canadian namesakes.

Fung’s noon-time talk - so well-attended that it required a last-minute venue change with requisite projector issues - was a valuable introduction to his practice from someone (such as myself) who was only tangentially familiar with his work, which commonly deals in personal history and issues of identity via documentary formats translated into the gallery setting. What does emerge to make sense of Landscapes is Fung’s love of geography (he studied the subject for a year at university before, in his words, ‘defecting’ to art) and his concern with the misrepresentation of culturally appropriated land. The latter is largely owed to a childhood of seeing his native Trinidad redefined in Hollywood films, but remains relevant in his experience - and that of all Canadians - of seeing this country depicted as an endless expanse of snow and wild moose.

His love of physical geography, in conjunction with an invitation from local curator Ingrid Mayrhofer (who you might recall as being responsible for some top-notch exhibitions at The Print Studio, so more kudos to her) to investigate the McMaster Museum’s collection, was what drew him to Hamilton to produce Landscapes. In short, Hamilton has geography in spades, a fact that becomes apparent when he fuses video views of the local landscape with Turner’s etching of Arundel in southern England - of the three videos, this is the most seamless and therefore the most effectively magical. The etched hills and deer gradually take on colour and subtle animation, then slowly transform themselves into grazing cattle and industrial skyline. The overall effect is similar to watching Dorothy transition from Kansas to Oz - perhaps in reverse, but in a cycle that never settles comfortably in a single place. That tension is heightened by Fung’s choice to fuse filmed footage of local places with Turner’s static image - the contemporary passages remain largely still, but evidence of time passing reveal themselves in subtle movements of leaves and water.

That sense of movement is especially haunting in the other two videos which both incorporate foreground views of water that constantly ripples whenever it shifts into the present-day. These are also the works that more clearly draw a parallel between old world and new through the adoption of British names for Canadian places - there’s something especially quirky in Fung’s injection of our Scarborough with the cliffs of the Yorkshire original. Both Turner’s and Fung’s Scarborough, however, are bustling places populated by ports and people, and the inclusion of these elements in both times and places creates that same collapse of elements as in Hamilton-Arundel - the effect is uncanny, in the truest sense of being familiar yet strange.

Richard Fung’s Landscapes is on view until 17 January, 2009, which leaves little excuse for finding time to have a look. It’s very much worth the visit but don’t park on campus if you can avoid it - their new payment system is ridiculously overpriced to the point of blasphemy.

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