Phil Irish: mount pile

Featuring the work of Phil Irish, mount pile examines one of our nation’s iconic geographies and landscape of extraction—the Canadian Rockies—depicted as simultaneously sublime and fractured in his site-specific installation that blends painting and sculpture.

Architecturally scaled and comprised of fragments of his painted landscapes, disassembled and torn, reassembled and pieced together, the installation extends up the wall of the AGG’s 50-foot-high clerestory gallery and out into the space. Irish began this body of work following a six-week residency at The Banff Centre, drawing on storied landscapes throughout Alberta that are the expression and effect of intense earth-moving practices and the extraction of raw materials, including the Athabasca Glacier, the oil sands, and neighbouring landfill sites. Recombining the fragments and shards of his original paintings, the chopped and spliced collages offer glimpses of tailing ponds and mountain peaks, geological striations and weather systems.

In its concept and construction, mount pile mimics geological processes of creation and destruction, querying our relationship with the lands on which we live and from which we take. Part of a long trajectory of Canadian painting and presented on the occasion of Canada’s 150th year, this exhibition interjects a contemporary perspective, addressing the imminent impacts of resource extraction and climate change.

Image detail: Phil Irish, Refraction (2017) oil on aluminum, 122 x 200 x 13 cm.