Eva McCauley: Ruptured Landscapes

ARTSPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Royal, N.S.

Eva McCauley, Plumbing the Depths, 2023, Oil on birch panel, 42″ x 54″

Ruptured Landscapes: Elegy for a Fragile World

August 1 – 24, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 3, 12 – 3pm
Live Music: Saturday, August 3, 1 – 3 pm
ARTSPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia

Ruptured Landscapes is a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Nova Scotian artist Eva McCauley, exploring the relationship between people and our fragile environment, a world threatened by systematic disintegration and devastation. Her paintings explore and speak to climate change, particularly on oceans and shorelines: the sea level is rising, waters are warming, storms are intensifying, lives and communities are at risk. Conjured partly from memory, partly from photographs, the figures in the paintings uneasily inhabit places that are explored in the past and present, with a focus on their relationship to bodies of water.

In Ruptured Landscapes colours are used that are deliberately oppositional to mirror the intensity of feeling that comes with living in a time of environmental crisis and societal upheaval. She employs contrasting, jarring colours and strong tonal contrasts to achieve a disquieting effect to depict contemporary threats of environmental destruction but also, within these, threads of hope and determination.

Eva McCauley, The Fluency of the Ocean, 2023, Oil on birch panel, 42″ x 54″

Experimenting with the combination of oil painting and printmaking approaches, McCauley explores a new visual language to create visceral landscapes and seascapes inhabited by figures ruptured by forces beyond their immediate control. She fragments and obscures elements of the figurative imagery to achieve an unsettling effect. There is a loose narrative in the paintings, one that is deliberately unresolved and ambiguous, to convey the feeling of uncertainty and unpredictability, with everything in flux.

Her paintings vacillate between figuration and abstraction; they explore the interplay between the representational and abstract.

The theme of this new body of work, Ruptured Landscapes is particularly relevant right now, because of the acute seriousness of the climate crisis.

McCauley is exploring this theme—our relationship to our endangered environment—in a way that is searching and honest, yet not without hope, discovering and contributing new insights and realizations to the present urgent discourse.

Watch a video on Ruptured Landscapes.

This body of work was funded by an Arts Nova Scotia Creation Grant, for which the artist is most grateful.

Eva McCauley, Fractured Sky, Ruptured World, 2024, Oil/mixed media on birch panel, 60″ x 96″

About the Artist

Eva McCauley is known for highly charged, vivid paintings that seamlessly merge abstraction with figuration. Her paintings are enigmatic and evocative psychological takes on the traditional landscape genre.

She is both a painter and printmaker, known for her atmospheric, expressive paintings of sky, water and shifting landscapes that incorporate human figures, exploring the passage of time and the transient and ephemeral nature of the spiritual and physical world. As a figurative artist she is fascinated with the human condition, and the fragility of our existence.

McCauley lives in L’sitkuk/Bear River, Nova Scotia, within the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people.

Her landscape paintings explore the idea of transience and memory. Rather than recreating a specific moment, she creates an image based on her memory of it. These shifting memories inform her paintings which present ephemeral, ghostly images that appear to emerge from dreamlike landscapes.

As a landscape painter, McCauley is increasingly concerned with climate change, particularly its effect on ocean environments. She blends these concerns with her exploration of recollection and mutability.

Her work explores the process of recollection and how we process memories. Her focus is not on the recreation of a specific image or moment, but the creation of something informed by the act of remembering — an act which renders past experiences as ephemeral, and constantly in flux, resulting in works which perpetually shift, their images lyrical, ghost-like, and ethereal.

McCauley is the recipient of many awards and scholarships, including the W.O. Forsythe Painting Award (1983), Bronfman Printmaking Award (1993), Warner Lambert Printmaking Scholarship (1994) “Best in Printmaking Award” at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (1996), “Ernst & Young Purchase Award” (1996), a Canada Council “Quest” Grant for Emerging Artists (2000), several Ontario Council Project Grants, as well as two Region of Waterloo Arts Fund grants in 2017 and 2019. Most recently, in 2022, she was awarded an Arts Nova Scotia “Creation” Grant to fund her painting project Ruptured Landscapes. She will be showing this series of paintings in a solo exhibition at the Saint John Art Centre in May/June 2026 in Saint John, N.B.

Her work can be found in many private and public collections such as the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Workers Art & Heritage Centre (Hamilton ON), the Ernst & Young Canadian Print Collection, the UNB Art Centre Permanent Collection (Fredericton, NB) and the Nova Scotia Art Bank Collection.

More info: www.evamccauley.com

Eva McCauley, Scotian Skies #7 (Magenta), 2024, Oil/mixed media on birch panel, 6″ x 6″

ARTSPLACE is a contemporary public art gallery and arts centre that is operated by the Annapolis Region Community Arts Council (ARCAC) in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.

ARTSPLACE acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

ARTSPLACE Gallery
Annapolis Region Community Arts Council
396 St. George Street, P.O. Box 534
Annapolis Royal, NS, B0S 1A0
902-532-7069
artsplace@arcac.ca
arcac.ca / FB @ARTSPLACEGallery / IG @arcac.artsplace

Accessibility: ARTSPLACE Gallery is fully accessible.

The artist acknowledges the financial support of Arts Nova Scotia.