Donald Lawrence is a Visual Arts teacher at the University College of the Cariboo, Kamloops, born in 1963 in Calgary, Alberta. He studied at the University of Victoria, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1986, and at York University, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1987, and also completed a Photography Residency in 1995 at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Scope and content
The work, entitled "The New Museum Model," by Donald Lawrence, 1985, consists of a construction in mixed media representing a miniature world of the museum and the landscape, incorporating an outfitted sled within a glass fronted painted wood case, 20.5 x 13 x 27.5 cm, with operable panels.
Note
The artist stated: "The miniature world of this maquette represents two spaces; that of the museum and that of the landscape. The kayak, for me, is not just the panorama that unfolds around me as I walk or kayak through some local or foreign place, but rather, it is also a tactile experience, mediated by all the things that I carry with me on my Travels. 'The Sled,' carefully outfitted as a caravel of the nineteenth century, yet somehow more of the 1990's, is an exaggeration of what I undertake each time I go travelling. I load my kayaks with a variety of provisions, each carefully fitted into the boat's frame, and most of those are small vessels of their own, waterproof, and with excessive layers of packaging to protect all the items inside. Like my kayak, 'The Sled' is constructed around an intricate wooden framework, its copper interior protecting the things carefully stowed inside. Its outer shell though, is rougher than the kayak, rock-like, and mimicking the surface textures of all those paintings by Turner, Cozens, and Constable that lie at the root of so many of my interests. The 'New Museum Maquette' takes those romantic pursuits, protecting them in its shrine-like space, at the same time as it suggests another environment, other landscapes; those of the museum and consumer culture. At the same time as it represents the emergence of this century's consumer culture the window of the 'New Museum' represents, for me, a foothold in the ornaments and excesses of the last century and it is from both of these tendencies, the romantic and the consumerist, which my stories emerge."
