The Wild Bush Residency is a sporadically run four-day retreat for artists in a non-remote cabin in the moderately urbanized Canadian wilderness. All residents are expected to participate in landscape painting sessions but are encouraged to react to the theme of landscape painting through their own artistic approach.

 

The Wild Bush Residency has been set up as an opportunity for artists and cultural workers to consider the ways in which our practice has been shaped by dominant narratives in Canadian art. Participants are encouraged to respond to the notion of landscape painting as a 'national' art while remembering the historic roots of the practice.

 

Considering that Canadian art has recently taken up a new found interest in pleinairisme, participants are asked to consider where their practice fits into this larger dialogue of wilderness, nature and a return to the 'wild'. At once the action and reaction to historic and contemporary artist colonies, communal living exercises and good old-fashioned art camps, The Wild Bush Residency prompts residents to think about the urbanization of the rural, the reality of the Canadian Wilderness and to question the sustainability and need of the back-to-the-land movement as it relates to their personal practices.