Opening Reception - Carolina de la Cajiga & Martha Jablonski-Jones: Urban Shift

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Martha Jablonski Jones, "Hard Being Human," nd

acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48"

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Carolina de la Cajiga, "Lions Gate Bridge Development: Future?," 2018

altered photography, laminated high gloss photo paper on aluminum e panel, archival ink, 20” x 80”

Please join us at the Deer Lake Gallery for the OPENING Urban Shift on Saturday, June 9, 2018 @ 12 pm.

We look forward to hosting artists talks featuring Carolina de la Cajiga on Saturday, June 16^th @ 2 pm and Martha Jablonski-Jones on Saturday June 23^rd @ 2 pm

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-Jones’ paintings address our relationships to our urban settings. Like others, she have loved Vancouver and struggled with it. Jablonski-Jones’ 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-Jones attempts to capture a constellation of love, regret, and entanglement with a city.