Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Ash .

Living in the Unknown (Photo Stills)

Living in the Unknown is a hybrid digital/analog piece displaying themes of dislocations and presence through the painterly qualities.

“Using two of my own personal photographs of my mother from her first arrival to Canada in 1998, far from her home, Guyana, I planned to create a collage that showcases the emotions one has when relocating and migrating. Exploring the use of projection, I focused on highlighting different aspects of the collage by using acrylic paint with a gel medium, pencils, and conte. I projected the image onto mylar, creating a hybrid picture plan. This allowed me to physically condense pixels of the images with the painterly strokes of my paint brush. Using this technique, I was able to visually stitch the images together with the mix-media, to create a surreal scene of the outdoors in combination with the indoors, with both surroundings being completely foreign to my mother, as she grew up in rural Guyana. In doing so I display the within and the without (my mothers presence vs her removal), as she is physically in Canada, but emotionally lost in this land. ”