Megan Green and Robert Guest

Fire Season brings together the work of two artists, Robert Guest and Megan Green, reflecting on wildfires as both natural events and urgent symbols of climate change.

Robert Guest (1938–2017), a longtime resident of Alberta’s Peace Country, spent many summers stationed at remote fire lookout towers. For decades, he created numerous paintings of the local landscape from memory and observation. One of the subjects he returned to continuously throughout his life was wildfires, capturing the power and spirit of these incredible forces of nature in his work.

Megan Green grew up in Fort McMurray. Through painting, drawing and sculpture, she examines the human and environmental costs of extraction and consumption. In this exhibition, her work responds to the devastating 2016 Horse River Wildfire and explores the complex realities of living in the ‘tar-sands.’ She uses the recurring motif of melted plastic: strange, unearthly artifacts from after the fire, weaving this thread throughout her work. In addition, Green incorporates found objects, such as antlers, velvet upholstery, hunting trophy plaques, faux wood paneling and plastic tourist trinkets into her work– each item closely linked to industry and small town Alberta life.

Fire Season is the 2nd in a series of exhibitions pairing an artist from the Gallery’s permanent collection (Robert Guest) with an artist connected to Northern Alberta (Megan Green). This presentation of their work together considers our changing relationship to the land, the growing intensity of wildfires and what they reveal about the world we’ve made.

Curated by Jessica Groome

ARTIST BIO

Robert Guest (1938 – 2017) was a noted landscape painter. Born in Beaverlodge, Alberta, his drawings and paintings were inspired by the summers he worked on regional fire lookout towers, including a decade at Willmore Wilderness Park north of Jasper. He translated his memories of forest fires, moonlit nights, and the changing seasons into a living visual record of Alberta’s Peace Country. Guest’s landscapes display all the moods, textures, colours and sublime effects of nature. His work distills the essence of place, and revealed the mystery found in nature, and his nocturnes were widely recognized for their ability to capture the light, the colour, and all the nuance of darkness.

In 1995, Robert Guest worked tirelessly with Lone Pine Publishing to release Trail North: A Journey in Words and Pictures – a book combining Guest’s paintings and drawings, as well as his collection of stories and anecdotes, of the historic Hinton Trail. Guest hiked more than 340 kilometers of the trail over a period of seven years, and mapped, sketched, then painted the historic and scenic trail in a series of seventy-two works. Guest cited the Hinton Trail book project as one of the highlights of his career, and spoke of how around “every bend of the river, there is a painting.” Guest’s art career spanned four decades and he contributed greatly to the strengthening and growth of Alberta’s artistic community. He was instrumental in the formation of the Peace Watercolour Society and the Prairie Gallery Society (now the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie), and was one of the first visual art instructors at Grande Prairie Regional College (now Northwestern polytechnic). He moved to Grande Cache in the nineties, and there he founded the Grande Cache Watercolour Society and continued to teach and volunteer widely. His deep commitment to his art and his community was unwavering.

(Bio adapted from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts: https://alberta.emuseum.com/people/996/robert-guest;jsessionid=E6FB82260FC7F26C9A75AA9F1389A25C)

Megan Green is a visual artist from Newfoundland who was part of a worker migration to the oilsands in the 1990’s; she completed an MFA at the University of Waterloo in 2014. Megan participated in the Banff Centre’s 2016 BRiC On Energy residency. Work from this residency was presented at the Petrocultures 2016 conference at Memorial University of Newfoundland, at the University of Edinburgh’s Postcards from the Anthropocene exhibition and published in Energy Cultures from West Virginia University Press. Her work was also included in the 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. Megan was an artist residence at the Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture in 2018 and in 2019 she presented at Animal Remains at The University of Sheffield. She has been the recipient of production grants from the Ontario Arts Council in 2017 and 2021, and of the Canada Council for the Arts 2021 Explore and Create program. Recent publications include an essay in Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture, in the International Journal of Cultural Studies. In 2022 Megan Green had a solo exhibition at the Tina Dolter Gallery in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

Artist website: https://www.megan-green.org/

Click the thumbnail to view Fire Season exhibition brochure

We acknowledge the support of the Province of Alberta through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.