Norberg Hall’s newest exhibition Branch Lines features Canadian born Indianapolis based artist Patrick Dunford’s latest series of paintings. Featuring 14 paintings completed between 2019 and 2024 the works continue exploring interests Dunford has pursued over the past decade while diving deeper into the artist’s process; conceptually driven the artist uses place as a lens to contemplate extractive industries and nature’s reclaiming of these spaces.

Dunford’s paintings focus on places he and his family lived and visited over the years, his presence in relation to each positing the artist’s questioning around industrial progress and nature’s reclaiming of space pointing to an earnest hope for the future. It’s Where the Wind Blows (2023) presents from a bird’s eye perspective a slim line of train cars rendered in taupe, brown and grey hues curving elegantly through a treed landscape. The inside of each car is painted pitch black suggesting the train is transporting coal, one of Canada’s biggest extractive industries and environmentally devastating. To build relatable narratives, Dunford often includes figures in his paintings. Salvagers (2024) features two figures in the foreground along the side of a road collecting old metal from a defunct rail line. The Quarry Swimmers (2023) features a turquoise blue rectangle, one small figure floating along the edge. The deserted Garson Limestone Quarry near Winnipeg, MB abandoned to nature has been transformed into a place for locals to swim. Such paintings not only humanize industrialized landscapes they also demonstrate the act of nature reclaiming space.

Falcon Lake, MB acts as an anchor point as the place where the paintings in this exhibition were completed. It was there, during long summer days that the artist would sit in a studio room meditatively looking out the window working on this suite of paintings. It is a locale the artist and his family return to yearly and where he has created a space dedicated to the slow, methodical processing of his world through the painterly gesture. This meditative quality present in the exhibition is achieved through his slow working methods, taking time with the act of painting. In a disciplined manner, Dunford plays with the layers, thickness and texture of his paint reflecting how his movements and gestures translate the reverence he holds for Mother Nature and her power of resistance. Thinking about traditional genres, Dunford’s paintings are not stereotypical landscapes, but rather paintings about place, place filled with the hope of nature’s powers of reclamation. This hope and reverence is subtly persistent throughout Branch Lines. Wild and free growing brush and trees abound in I’m Probably Running Away From The Thoughts Of The Day (2023). Mother Nature has reclaimed this place partially obscuring a domicile in the background, dwarfing a figure in the lower right foreground. Here these sentiments are abundant, a sense of calm evoked as the viewer imagines themselves within the stillness and silence of that place.

Within this suite of paintings, the artist has turned his concerns towards our present-day condition. This was prompted in part by Anna Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins in which the author uses the Matsutake mushroom as her inspiration to think about an imaginative, curious, and open future built on collaborative living in a period of precarity. Recalibrating his relationship to place, his understanding of human presence and our destructive impact on the planet, the artist directs his thinking into each canvas, embedding his hopes for a livable future into the impasto pigments and layers of each artwork.

Patrick Dunford’s paintings demonstrate indefatigable skill and knowledge of the history and conceptual basis of painting in Western art. Yet upon a slower and meditative observation a profound interpretation emerges. The paintings are open to a narrative in line with Tsing’s theories on how to live past this disastrous moment. As Dunford demonstrates in Branch Lines nature will rebound from the edge of destruction, Mother Nature will always resist complete devastation.