Landscape art as an umbrella category for any art form depicting or concentrating on scenery cuts out a big chunk of the substance of art history whether it involves sculpture, architecture or landscape painting. Why is landscape continually so appealing to artists? Christine Cheung, in answer to the question "how does your subconscious process of laying down painted marks always move toward depictions of landscapes or scenes?" says that she watched her father learn to paint traditional Chinese landscapes as a child. She then says that landscape is a way to paint portraits of people without having to paint faces. Painting the place rather than the person explores more than just a moment of where that person is in their life. It can expand upon the entire process of forming identity: of how individuals are influenced by political and geographical climates; of how their spiritual views affect the surrounding nature; whether they feel at home or alien; of how their desires are projected onto the land, and where we are heading as a society. "Place" is integral to our sense of self, as geographer and writer Yi-Fu Tuan has explored throughout his career. Each artist in the exhibition At Variance, in interviews with Erin Belanger and in keeping with Lucy Lippard's well trusted definition, has defined "place" as a complex network of influences- terrain, routines, artifacts, people, politics-which are continually reshaping each other.1

Marcy Adzich's sculptures offer imaginative land/sky/toy-scapes. It's like gazing in on a multi-level dollhouse or the world of a snail riding on the back of a mossy turtle shell. Adzich is interested in the transition of scale when "space becomes small enough to be an object, and objects become large enough to be considered space."2 Although Adzich's constructed spaces are too small to enter, they are large and replete enough to still be considered a "place." If our eyes can "feel" or distinguish different touches and surfaces through tactile memory as some architects insist, just by looking at the sculptures we can imagine being an inhabitant in them. She uses hobbyists' miniature grass, fences and trees to cover bloated surfaces made of paper mache or mylar balloons. Their forms often resemble round animal bodies and parts such as a moose antler, a duck, an udder, a swan and even a platypus. Once more, these organic forms resemble hills, cliffs, plateaus and other relief covered with mini trees, spray paint textures of land and sky, and tiny wood shingles or bricks.

Dead Swan by Marcy Adzich. Mixed Media. 2008.

Adzich references 17 C still-life paintings which embraced the piling up of ripe "stuff" including food, hunting game, house ware and flora in the foreground, with undulating vistas in the background. These historical still life paintings conflated the ideas of land and objects the way that contemporary roadside bargain tables and flea markets offer a slightly different array of knick-knacks and historical artifacts depending on where you are on the map. For instance, the pieces of wood cut furniture, party balloons, ribbons, tissue paper and fake flowers in Adzich's pieces suggest a setting for celebration, a basement party, or a parade float somewhere in Canadian cottage country. The artist's sculptures are micro landscapes that put the viewer in the position of "outside looking in" on a world separate from them. But the paradoxical element is that the artificial landscape of the piece is made on the surface of what in our real environment, is as small as an object. Together, they question whether we prefer being separate from our environment, looking in on it, or if we immerse ourselves in material culture in order to identify with "place" and feel integrated into the scene.

Christine Cheung also considers metaphorical or fictional places in her acrylic paintings and asks whether place is necessarily different for every individual. Although she developed the works in different locations such as Indonesia, Hong Kong and Calgary, she is aware that places are not definite things in themselves, and chooses to find instances where different histories and cultures blend in one place, requiring new hybrid definitions. In this way, she chose to paint a scene outside her hotel window in Indonesia, of the local Chinatown, which to her, seemed to evoke a Japanese atmosphere or aesthetic. The Circle Game looks at a group of figures in school uniforms, some with hijabs, holding hands in a courtyard. The headscarves are described in quick white circles leaving the paint underneath to convey an invisible face. Despite their various dress codes the children all blend together resembling Matisse's dancing figures. This was another scene Cheung captured in Indonesia where Muslim and non-Muslim school children were learning a game. Painting from various sources or memories, leading a diasporic lifestyle, and finding instances where markers of the local are misplaced and confusing, has allowed Cheung to probe a "type of estrangement or reconciliation with the place we are seeing and what we would like to see."3

Surrey - Waiting for it by Christine Cheung. Acrylic on canvas. 24" by 20"

Most of the paintings in the show convey a sense of fluidity, drifting, disappearance, and becoming in Cheung's layering of washes of blue's, whites, and watery colors. Sometimes she will use a thick stroke or drip of paint for compositional dynamics. These marks obliterate what's underneath, as decisions are made when mapping out the place, whether or not a painted gesture (indicating signs, trees or buildings) belongs. Writer Yi-Fu Tuan, mentioned earlier, distinguishes art alone as a "surrogate place" which offers a subjective grasp, or stable hold on ideas of home which in reality are changing, ever more global centers or "non-places."4 Cheung hopes that her art may be able to occupy a "place" where people feel neither totally united nor separated by culture.

Howe's work Bow River Topograph takes a distant perspective on the process of how space is made into place. From an aerial view, the viewer stands above stacks of white office paper arranged in a grid on the floor. The packages are unopened, unaltered except where Howe has cut the twisting, looping trace of the Bow River. Here, the artist's hand "drawn" or cut lines into each piece of paper form vertical depth into the layers. This activity as the only mark upon the map is also the only place where nature limits the otherwise flat, geometrical surface of the earth, ready for human development. The time Howe has spent finding unique paths on each subsequent layer of paper mimics the slow process of nature defining the form of the planet.

Bow River Topograph by Beth Howe. Office Paper. 2009.

Unlike the other two artists' works in the exhibition, Bow River Topograph is empty of descriptive symbols of place. Howe in her statement talks about emotional or psychological attachments to places, which necessarily develop over time. Her piece asks whether there are traces of these temporal relationships left behind in physical form or if the form of the land itself indicates in a derivative way what kind of psychology the people of the land come to adopt. In her piece, the only trace of human activity appearing on the landscape is a grid division of space into regular quadrants and the whitewashing of all variety. Howe seems to be stripping the land bare of everything except its base structure or topography to see how this might exist in its own right, and how everything we do rests atop a map of predetermined paths. The piece also offers the contemplation of what physical traces we as a city or civilization will leave behind or whether most of our daily activity is rendered invisible from a distant perspective in time.

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1 L. Lippard in "Out of Place" defines place as "a cultural landscape or cityscape, formed when culture and nature, politics and lives, meet in an almost surreal process to form a new entity." Retrieved June 3, 2009, from www.robbinsbecher.com/LippardArticle.pdf

2 Belanger, Erin. Interview with Marcy Adzich. May 2009.

3 Belanger, Erin. Interview with Christine Cheung. May 2009.

4 Beth Howe in her interview for At Variance: "Marc Auge has this idea of 'Non-Places' which bears on that: a non-place is a space that no one has emotional connection to, it's interchangeable with other spaces of its type: airports, chain restaurants off the freeway, the freeway itself. Non-places are familiar because they are all the same, they make us comfortable because we know how they work no matter where they are, but we don't tend to form attachments or histories or feel invested in these spaces."