While based on natural materials, forms, and processes, southern Manitoba's rural landscape is in large part a human constructed one. For over a hundred years, farmstead shelterbelts have had a major role in this landscape construction.

This exhibit centres on Manitoba farmstead shelterbelts in the early 2020s — distinctive, everyday, rural landscape elements of a particular place and time — and their significance for those who live with them.

Farmstead shelterbelts have long intrigued me. Until recently, as I traveled across North America's prairies and plains, I usually viewed them from outside—from the highway or from the air. Their layered rows of trees sometimes simply seem planted members of a family of stark, clean, vertical forms punctuating the landscape's horizontality. On the other hand, viewed from outside and afar, they can suggest medieval fortresses, their tall conifers reminiscent of cypresses enclosing an imperial garden. And indeed, these trees create ‘rooms' — gardens — landscapes within the larger landscape, spatially and microclimatically different, and signalling protection from, the surrounding wind-swept expanses. I believe Manitoba's shelterbelts are not only significant and distinctive visual and ecological elements of the rural landscape but that they are also psychologically, socially and culturally meaningful.

— Brenda J. Brown