FEBRUARY 22 – APRIL 15, 2018

Organized in partnership with Jumblies Theatre, this initiative explores and expresses people’s differing relationships to a place: what they like, want to change, remember, have learned, hold in mind from different places and times, wish for and imagine. Artists and diverse community members will create and bring to life their own lands, through drawings, words, miniature models, music, conversation and performance.

Four Lands takes the form of an evolving gallery, with ongoing public drop-ins, offsite workshops and other activities as arranged, a project launch and final presentation and celebration.

This project is supported by the Hazel McCallion Fund at the Community Foundation of Mississauga, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

FOUR LANDS

Four Lands is a Jumblies travelling arts project. It explores and expresses people’s differing and converging relationships to a shared place. Through drawings, words, miniature models, music, stories, photographs and gentle performance, we create and animate four imaginary landscapes: Goodland (what we like), Badland (what we wish to change), Lostland (what we hold in mind from other times and places), and Dreamland (what we imagine, dream of and wish for).

Four Lands takes the form of an evolving gallery: starting in each place with an invitation for people of varied ages and backgrounds to take part. People are included through public drop-ins at the home-base or gallery, workshops taken to local community groups, related activities such as artist talks, presentations, public conversations, performances, a project launch and a closing presentation and celebration. The Mississauga artistic team includes Ruth Howard, Adrienne Marcus Raja, Sharada Eswar, Laura Hale, Heather Long, Binaeshee-Quae Couchie-Nabigon, Marianne Alas and others. An open-ended number of people of all ages and backgrounds can contribute to the activities and events. The more varied and numerous the participants, the better.The depth, quality, interest and very existence of the installation and presentation in each place grow from the images and words offered by those who take part.

Four Lands originated in 2010 as part of Jumblies multi-year residency in East Scarborough. In 2013, it was developed as Four Lands of Nipissing for a residency at North Bay’s Whitewater Gallery, and was revived in 2016 as a touring project, hosted by partners across the country. Since then it has travelled to Thunder Bay, the Ottawa Valley, Kenora, Sioux Lookout, Kasabonika Lake, Vancouver, Halifax, rural Nova Scotia, Southwest Saskatchewan, Regina and Winnipeg, and a Toronto Four Lands event at Evergreen Brick Works.

The Four Lands project aims to spark creativity, curiousity, conversation, and understanding across diverse and intersecting perspectives, by offering engaging entry points into the many-layered questions related to our relationships and responsibilities to the places where we live and the people that reside there.

We are proud and excited now to bring the project to Mississauga and surrounding Peel Region over a seven-week period. Thanks to the Art Gallery of Mississauga, as well as the numerous Four Lands partners, host galleries, artists, elders, knowledge-sharers, participants and funders.

Ruth Howard

Artistic Director, Jumblies Theatre