Co.Lab Gallery presents
GUY WALTER
ECHOTERRAIN
OPENING FRIDAY FEBRUARY 10TH, 2023 7-10PM
EXHIBITION CLOSES FEBRUARY 26TH
ECHOTERRAIN ekəʊtəˈreɪn
Telling a story of our transforming landscape by mining the history of past ideas and creations to form a new vernacular
Guy Walter is a Canadian Artist, Urban Planner, and Landscape Architect who was born, raised, and recently returned to Thunder Bay. As a youth, he explored the spacious and grand scale of the Northern Ontario landscape through both a micro and macro lens. Taking the ideas and memories of those early explorations with him through his educational and professional growth was fundamental to how he formed his sense of place and scale. Educated in fine arts, geography, civil engineering, urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture Guy formed a hybrid approach to how he developed ideas and projects. The most formative period of that education came while studying both Fine Arts/Sculpture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto where he created large-scale urban design models that doubled as sculptural artifacts to tell the story of a place. These artifacts and drawings illustrated the thought and design process he went through to develop projects that support how and where we live.
For the last 25-plus years Guy has been working and showing globally as he called Toronto, Montreal, Sarasota, Seattle, Beijing, and Shanghai home. Since the early 2000s, Guy has worked on and explored the mega-explosion of urbanization across Asia. The complexities of this urbanization drove his creativity to explore solutions to plan cities and environments that can restore ecosystems for all users. Understanding this urban and social transformation throughout Asia as taking place in a fraction in time, Guy decided to catalogue and document his journey through drawings and paintings to form visions of livable cities for tomorrow – these ideas evolved further as solutions for communities and cities in transition.
ECHOTERRAIN takes the process-based work, that he has been meticulously catalogued over the last few decades, Restores, Re-Imagines, and Re-Invents
his illustrations to form new concepts, ideas, and narratives about our living landscape and urban form. Drawing, Painting, Peeling and Scraping away his
paintings to reveal layers to be once again drawn and painted over - ensuring the history of the painting’s origins are removed, re-imagined, or preserved.
This is not a narrative depicting destroyed or exploited landscapes - this is an optimistic exploration of what can be re-imagined through real processes
and learning from our history. It is a story that presents a synthesis of utopian and dystopian reflections – mining the history of past ideas and creations to form the new vernacular.
You may contact the artist for purchase or general inquiries at urbansurface@me.com.
