LOVELAND is an artist book conceptualized and designed by Canadian artist Charles Stankievech that collects primary sources, fiction, and critical texts as part of the an artwork produced for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) and the Sobey Art Award in the fall of 2011. Typical of the artist’s research methodology, the book links a spectrum of fields across a broad span of history. Somewhere between the two poles of color field painting and military colonization in the Arctic, Stankievech has created a dense web that connects the birth of synthetic pigment and chemical warfare to the Romantic landscape and contemporary geopolitical issues. As curator Mark Lanctôt writes in his critical essay: “Stankievech’s work [...] directs us away from a-political modernist pictorial utopias towards something more telling: how the relationship between the narrative of history and the site it is connected to can veer into unsuspecting directions, escaping our perceived mastery over it.”
