Image: Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton
'Bearing Witness to War' brings together the work of three Canadian artists who experienced and reflected on war from very different perspectives. Canada has had a program of documenting its war efforts since 1916, when Lord Beaverbrook created the Canadian War Memorials Fund; photographers and filmmakers documented Canadian efforts on the frontlines, in the rear echelons and on the homefront, while Canadian artists created their artistic impressions of the war effort.
The exhibition looks at war through three distinct views: Alex Colville as a serving soldier documenting events as they happened; Nancy Stevens’s mature reflections as a child who lost a parent to war, bringing events from more than six decades earlier to life through research and imagination; and Allan Harding Mackay’s impressions as a civilian amid a modern war machine, aware of danger yet insulated from the frontlines.
Artist, curator and educator Mackay was a civilian war artist for the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program in Somalia in 1993 and Afghanistan in 2002; in Kandahar, he was confined to the airport because it was too dangerous for a civilian to work outside the main base. His chosen medium of hand-altered photography allowed near-instant impressions of Canadian service personnel, while returning to those images with paint, wax and other media gave him time to process what he had taken and create works from his impressions and feelings about the conflicts he was recording.
