The National Gallery of Canada is getting into the business of international cash prizes in the visual arts, with the launch today of a show called Elusive Paradise.

The group show includes works by the renowned Canadian artists Jeff Wall, Geneviève Cadieux, Valeska Soares, Janet Cardiff, Tacita Dean, Shahzia Sikander, Jana Sterbak, Yoshihiro Suda, Diana Thater, and Liz Magor. One of these 10 artists will be selected, on March 7th, as the winner of the first Millennium Prize.

Meanwhile, gallery-goers are the real winners. This is a spectacularly ambitious exhibition in which the artists have been asked to explore themes relating to our relationship to nature at the dawn of a new millennium.

Pour un oui pour un non, by Genevieve Cadieux, a gelatin silver print

According to the Gallery: "For centuries artists, poets and gardeners have been creating idealized versions of nature, whether as a frame for human pursuits, or as an imagined refuge from the pressures of humanity... Yet the vision of Arcadia as a middle landscape between inhospitable wilderness and over-refined civilization remains a compelling metaphor. Parks and gardens, even suburbs, have their arcadian features and seem to exist in part to satisfy the human desire to find in nature a refuge and a home. At the beginning of the 21st century this desire faces many challenges. For some artists, the arcadian notion of nature as refuge can only be seen ironically. Although the ideal midpoint where the human and natural worlds are in balance is elusive, others still turn to nature as the subject of images whose sensual beauty summons up visions of paradise lost. Whether their means are modern or traditional, the artists in the exhibition remind us in new ways of the old insight that nature is not a term that excludes us: to know it is to understand ourselves."

Wall, Cadieux, Soares and Magor will be on hand Saturday at the Ottawa gallery to discuss their work in the exhibition Elusive Paradise (1 to 3 p.m.), and in the coming months the gallery has a number of public programs to build on the series. Highlights include:

Coastal Motifs by Jeff Wall, a colour transparency in a lightbox

- Saturdays, Feb. 24, Mar. 3 & 10, 10 am to 12 noon Landscape Today. A series of three lectures by Johanne Sloan, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University. In the Lecture Hall.

- February 24: The Utopian Horizon. In the history of Western art, landscape has often presented itself as a kind of natural dreamworld. Some contemporary artists have suggested that it is possible to re-interpret this vision.

- March 3: Into the Landscape: History and/or Entropy. How do artists go about re-inscribing histories and memories onto the natural environment?

- March 10: Ecological Views. The present-day awareness of a beleaguered or depleted natural world seems to call for a new kind of landscape art.

- April 8: Mapping Arcadia: Spaces and Landscapes of Perfection. Arcadia signifies a persistent connection in the Western imagination between environmental and social perfection. Lecture by Denis Cosgrove, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of numerous books and essays on landscape meanings and symbolism. In the Lecture Hall.