The Thousands

Ideas man and jauntily named critic Northrop Frye was pretty much obsessed with his theory that the Canadian artistic imagination was a direct function of frequent and unsettling encounters with the wilderness. I’ve always wondered if you could say the same thing about any country with great swathes of bush – the curators at OK Gallery suggest that you can.

Wilderness Years is the gallery’s fourth show and its first with work from multiple artists. Nathan Barnett, David Egan, Tom Freeman, Ben Kovacy, Emma McPike and Jacob Ogden Smith have joined forces to produce a multi-disciplinary exhibition that explores their encounters with the wilderness.

Themes range from the concrete (Kovacy’s full scale, hand-made canoe) to the metaphorical (Egan’s work on the domestication of abstract expressionism). Contemporary mythologies have figured heavily into previous OK shows, so expect Wilderness Years to continue this trend by asking questions about the stories we create to understand our brushes with the wild.