Exhibition Opening – Urban Shift

Description

Urban Shift is an exhibition that will be held at the Deer Lake Art Gallery featuring the works of Carolina de la Cajiga and Martha Jablonski, and is hosted and organized by the Burnaby Arts Council. The exhibition will open Saturday, June 9, 2018 and will run until June 30, 2018.

Urban Shift explores two perspectives on the Vancouver urban landscape. The works are shaped by personal relationships to the city, and expressed through manipulated photographic images and painting.

Carolina de la Cajiga’s work focuses on the hasty changes our cities are going through. Each artwork is composed of multiple photographs, which she stitches together, and then alters digitally. Photography allows de la Cajiga to move buildings to new settings, to reshape, reduce or enlarge them. The creation process involves a bit of architecture, engineering, city planning and lots of imagination. The expected growth of our city makes for a carefully orchestrated project as the available land is limited by nature -water and mountains are our fixed boundaries. Carolina de la Cajiga’s approach this subject whimsical, though the issue has serious repercussions affecting current and future residents of the city, she aims to bring these issues to the forefront.

Martha Jablonski’s paintings address our relationships to our urban settings. Like others, she have loved Vancouver and struggled with it. Jablonski’s work is divided into three layers: the visual, metaphorical, and emotional considerations. The visual considerations are based on the configuration of space by urban structures: intersecting lines, dynamic tensions, juxtapositions, perspectives. Metaphorically, massive hydro structures suggest ideas about balance of power: the man-made vs. the natural, the powerful vs. the powerless; vulnerable humans, dwarfed by mighty urban structures. Emotionally, the unease about affordability: so many anxious conversations about being able to stay, or having to leave. It is on these three levels that Jablonski attempts to capture a constellation of love, regret, and entanglement with a city.