Visible Storage Project
Located on the gallery’s second floor, this initiative allows the safe display of works from our permanent collections and will support increased community access as well as curatorial and research opportunities.
Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea presents landscapes by Canadian artist Takao Tanabe from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection. The installation chronicles over 20 years of Tanabe’s practice in printmaking, encompassing processes including lithography, photogravure, woodblock printing, and etching.
Evoking a strong sense of place with a simplicity that borders on abstraction, the works are almost topographical. Surveying and illuminating moments layered with mysticism, landscape becomes a living, rhythmic thing. Tanabe’s spaces are not confined to the pictorial frame – there is a dimensionality that places us within a larger encounter. The compelling compositions suggest a solitary point of view – that of a single viewer standing on the edge of the sublime – and that, across these images, there is only land, sea, and you.
Image detail: Takao Tanabe, Marble Island, QCI, (TP 2/4) 1995, lithograph on paper, 46.4 x 89.5. Collection of the Art Gallery of Guelph
The Art Gallery of Guelph would like to extend its sincere appreciation to the Government of Canada, through Canadian Heritage, whose support is gratefully acknowledged in the realization of this important project.
