Shedding Layers: David Righton, Jenn Ashton and Nicole Smith

OPENING RECEPTION of Shedding Layers on Saturday, February 18th, 12 pm.

Shedding Layers is an exhibition that will be held at the Deer Lake Art Gallery featuring the work of Visual Artists David Righton, Jenn Ashton and Ceramicist Nicole Smith. Shedding Layers is hosted and organized by the Burnaby Arts Council.  The Exhibition will open on February 18th and will run until March 11th, 2017.

The three artists participating in Shedding Layers have rendered imagery sprung from dreams, stories, and their hopes and fears for the future. It is a colourful exhibit that will aid the viewer in shedding all the layers of winter and embracing the vibrancy of spring.

Righton is a self-taught artist who creates work through labour-intensive processes using all manner of objects such as scrap wood alongside conventional pallet knife and brushes in order to produce, in layers, work that is highly evocative and dreamlike in the tradition of remembrance art. Righton strives to capture images from dreams shifting everyday concepts from the known to the unknown. Righton lives and works in Port Moody.

Ashton is an author and artist who creates endless layers with collage and acrylic paint as her medium. Her works appear as dreamlike images in which her poetry and subconscious imagery fuse. Her work contains a visual seductiveness that she hopes will entice, through her vibrant images, what Ashton refers to as a deep belly laugh. Ashton is an award-winning artist who has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Smith has sought out the crow as the muse for her current conceptual ceramic art. Her 3 dimensional whimsical sculptures capture all that the real sees in this dark bird. Her interests in the crow are the multi-layered associations that almost all cultures have with the crow. Harbinger of doom, scavenger, nuisance; they all capture man’s fears and anxiety that are faced in the wake of environmental devastation, financial crisis and social breakdown. Hope materializes as we realize the crow’s adaptability, resourcefulness and survivalist abilities and our very similar characteristics. Smith is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Comosun College. She currently works out of Hello World Ceramics Art Studio in Vancouver.