Conspicuous Collapse

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L: Biliana Velkova, "Pink Desert I," 2021)

oil pastel and watercolour on Arches paper. RIGHT: Erika Mashig, Dome Bog (2020), Linocut on paper

North Van Arts is proud to present Conspicuous Collapse, an exhibition of artwork from Biliana Velkova, Erika Mashig and Sunshine Frère. Works in this exhibition explore the thematic of breakdown across a range of media: painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and video. 

“This exhibition was proposed in February of 2020, portending our knowledge that 2020 would be one of the most conspicuous years of our lifetime. COVID 19 has accelerated the themes behind the exhibition and has given us an urgency to explore and investigate further. All works included address destruction as a necessary part of creation and growth. As artists, we are drawn to the notion of resilience, which there cannot be without loss and change. Living in an era where instability feels like the new normal, we seek to find strategies for working with and within change, which is truly the only constant. As artists, we are interlocuters between systems and signifiers, and cycles of renewal as well as paths of destruction. This exhibition presents the notion that there is no such thing as finality, but there are most definitely, beautiful breakdowns.”

Velkova’s drawings delve into construction and deconstruction from the perspective of development within the city. Public spaces are constantly shifting because of the frenzied rate of change within the greater Vancouver District. Velkova’s work captures this change, provoking us to consider how the shifting city is continually replacing and rewriting our memories of public space. Velkova’s large-scale drawings are displayed alongside her series of oil paintings. The traditionally ‘slow and smooth’ nature of oil painting provides a contrast to the instantaneous, abrupt and all-encompassing, high-volume painted ‘public’ spaces represented in each large-scale drawing.

Mashig’s medium of linocut is naturally destructive. She creates reduction prints, cutting and taking away, before adding layers, shapes and colours to create an image. Build up and breakdown are integral to her dynamic process. Each stage of carving is slow and methodical, constantly diminishing until the image is complete and there is hardly a memory of what was there before. Her print series reveals not only the construction of an image, but, at the same time, the deconstruction of the medium.

Working in video and photography Frère prompts a little anxiety in the viewer. In her stop-motion poetry, each word constantly forms then, just as quickly, it disintegrates. Becoming legible and illegible at different points makes the projected poem difficult to read in its entirety. Her poem serves as an abstract reflection on the chaotic year of disruption that the whole world has witnessed.