INTERIOR LANDSCAPE SERIES

Brittany Landscape & Ethiopian Landscape

These two sculptures were presented concurrently as a collaboration between the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Charles H. Scott Gallery of the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Ethiopian Landscape referred to the underground churches in that African country, which were cut out of the natural rock and have their rooves level with the surrounding land. Brittany Landscape was sequential with Ethiopian Landscape and used the pre-Celtic ceremonial sites of Brittany in Northern France as its inspiration.

Cogswell said, “I consider the symbols of the cross and the altar in these sculptures as metaphors for the human quest for spiritual wisdom: desirable and fragile but, more importantly, almost unobtainable.”

Sight Slope, which Cogswell exhibited in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s ‘Winnipeg Perspective Sites’ exhibition in 1980, was the first in this interior series. In place of the hillside, grass, concrete and steel materials of the exterior works, he used a wooden structure, grid work, architectural glass and light. The forms, components and visual language were consistent with the exterior explorations. The simple wedges of the hillside, the graphic divisions of the surfaces used as large multi media drawings, the cave-like openings and the parallel beams were all elements that he had used for some time.

In the earlier, exterior works such as Long Barrow 6, he had hoped to build structures suggestive of timeless references to sanctified spaces and no longer present cultures. Sight Slope takes those ideas into the gallery by using the idea of a typical chapel that would have been built in the interior of a European cathedral.