Patrick Mills, artist and creator of the “I Killed the Group of Seven” exhibit, at his studio in Hintonburg.
A horse had electric red blood spurting from a neck artery. Zombies stalked between Parliament Hill and the U.S. Embassy. And the bright autumn leaves that had fallen around the trees in the lakeside landscape couldn’t hide the piles of trash.
The exhibition “I Killed the Group of Seven,” promoted in posters on telephone poles across Ottawa, opened Nov. 11 to a packed house at the Patrick John Mills Gallery on Hinchey Avenue.
When Ottawa artist Patrick Mills planned the exhibition, he says he wanted to attract “non-conformist” work, not denigrate the seven iconic Canadian landscape painters.
“I’ve always been attracted to the Group of Seven. I love A.Y. Jackson’s paintings and Lawren Harris’s work,” says the softspoken curator.
As a young artist, he says he visited contemporary galleries in Vancouver and the art failed to move him.
“The art that was being shown I considered to be very professional, commercial, well done, but it failed to emotionally stimulate any inner dialogue,” he says. “The art was just too safe, too happy, too pleasant.”
He says the “I Killed the Group of Seven” title occurred to him in a parking lot in British Columbia. When he got home, he printed 120 black-and-white posters asking for submissions and placed them all over Ottawa.
The response was immediate. “In a month I received over 200 postal submissions and countless e-mail submissions from all around the world.”
In the end, he chose 18 mostly local artists.
“If I felt like it was compulsory for [the artist] to express themselves, then I went with that,” says Mills. “He wanted to choose artists who “were not trying to create a product, but . . . needed to paint.”
“See that guy over there?” asks Mills, indicating a young man standing by a series of red reliefs. “He’d go bonkers if he didn’t create that.”
“That guy” is Centretown artist Dane Atkinson.
“This is the only way I can express myself,” says Atkinson, who works at Wallack’s art store on Bank Street. “I like to be graphic and get reactions.”
“These paintings started off as female portraits,” he says, pointing out the red reliefs. “I wasn’t happy so I decided to remake them. I made a kind of landscape of internal organs,” he says.
Variations on the “I Killed the Group of Seven” theme ranged from the literal – an artist smeared a cork rendering of a boat paddle with his own blood in a representation of the suspect death of Group of Seven artist Tom Thomson – to the surreal. Montreal artist Mathieu Laca filled a wall with vividly coloured animals hunting humans amid a backdrop of oil wells.
“The idea is to break this picturesque image of Canada, that romantic idea of nature,” Laca explains. “This is nice but it’s not relevant to our lives right now. Most of us don’t live there.”
“I Killed the Group of Seven” runs at the Patrick John Mills Gallery though Dec. 2.