ANGELL GALLERY invites you to Witness, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by B.C.-based Kyle Scheurmann. The exhibition shall be on view by appointment from March 17 to April 24, 2021, with a virtual artist talk available on YouTube. Schedule your viewing appointment HERE.
“I respectfully enter each new encounter with the land as a guest and student,” says Scheurmann from his Shawnigan Lake studio. Depicting both the beauty and the tension present in Canadian forests and lands from the East to West coasts, he feels the responsibility and the privilege of representing the environment we must preserve, while allowing us to see the destruction and devastation that is taking place.
“Recently, this has resulted in paintings of distress. Fires and floods are the content of new paintings as the environment continues to change beyond all historical norms.” From this special vantage point, deep in the woods on Vancouver Island, Scheurmann’s new work has taken on a form of reverential reportage from the front lines of deforestation, wildfires, and human impact on the land.
With dedication to conservation groups and organizations--this is the second year of Scheurmann’s artist residency with the Georgian Bay Land Trust in Ontario--he is deeply immersed and engaged in contemporary environmental activism and preservation. “The fluidity of the paint is in correspondence with the ever transforming state of the earth; stuck between growth and decay, continually resolving itself for the viewer,” he says. “I translate field studies into oil paintings, informed by both the composition of the study and the embodied knowledge acquired from time in the woods.”
These landscapes, born from exploration and experience, are hybrids of Canadian iconography in respectful and forward-looking conversation with Canadian art history that serve as a reminder of our interconnectedness. There is hope in movement and community. From across this country and beyond its borders--from a cabin in the woods, from the seat of a canoe, and from the banks of a shoreline--come these poignant requests to acknowledge the state of our land and our people. And to bear witness.
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Kyle Scheurmann currently works and lives in Shawnigan Lake, which is on unceded Cowichan Territory in British Columbia. He received an MFA in 2018 from Emily Carr University, graduating as valedictorian. Scheurmann is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation painting award. Scheurmann has exhibited across Canada, as well internationally in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Reutlingen in Germany, Galleri Golsa in Norway, and The Hole in New York. He is the current artist-in-residence for the Georgian Bay Land Trust in Ontario Canada.