Urban Diary
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This exhibit of large-scale collages explores humour, nostalgia and grittiness, all brought center stage in the representation of the city’s neighbourhood alleyways. We tend to present the best possible façade to the public. Andrea Kastner, on the other hand, finds beauty on the other side of the coin, the spontaneous and unedited cityscapes of our daily lives. Artist Andrea Kastner is interested in the intimate, unvarnished truth of the anti-façade. Like a survey documenting her neighbourhood, her works bring to light the absurd and subtle ways that people let down their guard and allow their individuality to shine through . The medium she uses is appropriately unglamorous. Working on plywood, she builds up a collaged surface of everyday materials including metro transfers, shopping bags, electrical tape and price tags. Discussing the process involved in creating these works, the artist states: “As we empty out our pockets at the end of the day, we unearth a small cascade of tickets, transfers, wrappers and receipts. These remnants of our daily trajectories, which usually end up in the garbage can, are the raw materials that I use to build my cityscapes.” Urban Diary examines the colorful neighbourhood of NDG, where Andrea Kastner grew up, in the heart of the west end of the city of Montreal. The artist currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta where she is pursuing her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. She has also taught art to children at the Visual Arts Centre in Westmount. Her current art projects can be viewed at www.andreakastner.ca. |
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