STATEMENT

These paintings and drawings were made between the Winter of 2023 and 2024, and are inspired by Eastern Germany and Poland (where I traveled in the Winter of 2023), and Vancouver, a city that I’m new to as of a year and a half. Within this time, I became fascinated with public transit systems and artificial light, and my paintings turned to explore the relationship between synthetic structures and natural environs – and how, visually, this relationship manifests in my narrative. Dreamscapes emerged. Trees punctuate the metal floor of the skytrain in Reflections in the Glass, connecting the earth below the train track – omitting borders between these things – while also retaining a sense of boundary. I found it an instinctive process to join the synthetic and the natural, but also found that the two remain distinctly apart – not speaking the same language, but brought together by human infrastructure. This observation inspired an exploration of how humans interact in the sometimes undecided, sometimes joined, synthetic and natural structures of urbanity.

BIO

Ella MacQueen-Denz lives and works on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations. She received a certificate in textiles from the Kootenay School of Arts and a BA in English and Germanic Studies at the University of Victoria. Her work explores sexuality, vulnerability, experiencing of emotions and memory in the body, and relationship between body and environment. The influence of Germanic folklore and fairytales can be seen in her work, as well as the Surrealist traditions of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Ella is inspired by the therapeutic possibilities of art-making – something which she witnesses in her own practice, as well as in her recreation work with senior populations, youth, and with people who use drugs. Art as therapy grounds her in her practice, and motivates the compositions and stories that emerge in her work.

Ella’s exhibitions include a solo show at Xchanges Gallery (Victoria), and group exhibitions Push with the Salt Spring National Art Prize, Defiant Beauty at Art Spring Gallery (Salt Spring Island),Visage at the Rockslide Gallery (Victoria), The Nature of Memory with the Salt Spring Arts Council, and Emerge with Sweetpea Gallery (Victoria). Ella participated in a two-person residency at the Point Gallery (Salt Spring Island) in 2022, where she and a co-artist collaborated on the exhibition The Rabbit in My Belly and the Ghosts that Surround Me. She participated in the Tools For Change residency in Spring 2024 at Makerlabs in East Vancouver.