Michele Alborg: The Sentimental Spectator

Places of loss are deconstructed and distorted in paintings by Michele Alborg's, second year Master of Applied Art student. Visions of parks, waterfront plazas, playgrounds and other nostalgic public places are remembered, constructed, and demolished. These places deny the viewer the comfort of representing any specific location, and yet seem uncannily familiar. Built forms transgress from optimistic ideas of the future into ruined, crumbling memorials of a forgotten past. The drawn elements of the architecture and the figures create a feeling of unease with the ambiguity of their presence.

Perhaps they are merely figments of an environmental designers imagination? Empty spaces, rigorous mark making and flattened planes of colour undermine a coherent sense of depth. Reality is continuously rejected and yet a sentimental quality remains. There is a tension between a sense of what could be, what the creator hoped there should be, and what is actually happening. Nature becomes the active agent, wrecking violence or whispering unpleasant outcomes. Hurricanes, earthquakes and forest fires rage in the paintings and yet the people linger, unaffected or unaware of the events unfolding around them.

Opening Friday, April 3, 2009
6pm to 8pm
()Space Gallery
Emily Carr Master Studios
1612 West 3rd Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia