Holly Chang

Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea (2023)
Art Gallery of Guelph

Curated by Holly Chang, with works from the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph

Takao Tanabe

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.

https://artgalleryofguelph.ca/exhibition/seeing-the-land-feeling-the-sea/