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Andrea Kastner Shadow Cities

Gallery Tour with the Artist: Thursday October 4 at 5 pm
Vernissage: Thursday October 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: October 5 to 27

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Shadow Cities, an exhibition of new work by painter Andrea Kastner. Her recent experience as artist-in-residence at the Haliburton landfill saw her sitting on the side of a hill made of the accumulated decades of refuse, painting the landscape of our unwanted goods. There, she thought of the way these mountains of waste in a landfill site are an accidental construction of our times, a shadow city built beside the one we live in. On one hand is the urban landscape built with the things we chose, and here was the landfill, carved by the negative space of our desires. Kastner’s work focuses intently on the things we choose to look away from. This exhibition includes several small panels painted en plein air at the landfill, as well as large format paintings of other places she has documented in the context of her family’s many moves and travels – from the frozen compacted waste in Dawson City, Yukon, to a floating house in Iowa City, or a demolition of a flood-damaged apartment in Binghamton, NY, her current place of residence.

Kastner is interested in the cracks and crevices of our built environment. Her paintings imbue these neglected spaces with a glow that comes from looking at the unseen. She exaggerates these slippages by using collage in the planning stage of the paintings, adding tears and holes in the source material, and employing lines of painter’s tape to hold together the fragile reality of the dump. All these fragments of places, these factories, homes, hotels, and wastelands, are bound together in this series of paintings, falling apart and rising up in a collaged reality that is built and unbuilt like a puzzle.

The city is a text being written and re-written, with evidence of revisions in every delicate scar traced on a brick wall. As buildings are torn down, façades exposed, and garbage collected and dumped in the landfill, drafts and corrections to the city are made visible. Kastner’s paintings are a half-written poem to the shadow city, the secrets and ghosts in crumbling and neglected objects, doors that are not walked through but rather appear as portals to alternate worlds.

Andrea Kastner is a Canadian painter based in Binghamton, NY. She holds a BFA from Mount Allison University (2006) and an MFA from the University of Alberta (2012). Her work has been shown in galleries across Canada, including solo shows at Harcourt House (Edmonton), the Kamloops Art Gallery, and ODD Gallery (Dawson City), and group shows at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and the Esker Foundation (Calgary). She has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the BC Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and was a finalist for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2012. She has participated in residencies at the University of Windsor, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and most recently, she was the Reclaim Artist in Residence at the Haliburton School of Art and Design.

 

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