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Dina Gonzalez Mascaro
Rubble
February 16 to March 24 2007
Artist Talk: February 17
Artist statement
"My new work is inspired by architecture, urban changes and machinery. For the past five years I have been living in Vancouver, a changing city, where the sites and sounds of "progress" are part of daily life. Perpetual construction and demolition are our landscape, as powerful as the mountains. An invisible city lies latent in the air.
My interest in this latent city first appeared to me in my "landscape de la nada (landscape of nothing)" paintings where simple cubic structures repeat and grow infinitely, empty cubes endlessly multiplying like a plague.
Over one mountain landscape an imaginary city is suspended, growing, making a mesh that occupies everything. This imaginary city becomes real as we witness the daily demolition of the city that we know to make way for a future city. My interest in the invisible city of the future has shifted to the present, to the rubble, the demolition sites, the elements of architecture that have begun to disappear.
The demolition creates rubble, a new element: a focus for this project.
Rubble: part of a whole that has been destroyed. Part of a whole that has history. The new work recuperates pieces of a history, transforming it into an artwork. As an artist I am more interested in the destroyed and lost, than that which "progress" brings us.
My work aims to reveal and preserve that which is not seen."
Dina Gonzalez Mascaro was born in Argentina in 1965. She has a Masters degree in fine arts from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata where she specialized in sculpture.
While living in Argentina she presented her work in numerous provincial and national exhibits. In 2000, she won the Antorchas Foundation's International Scholarship to attend a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, in Banff Canada and in 2001 returned to Canada for a residency at the Western Front in Vancouver, BC. She is now a permanent resident of Canada, living and working in Vancouver.
Her shows have included Uncertain Forest, a solo exhibition in B/K gallery (2005), Dogs at the Gallery42 in Vancouver and Sorry I'm a Jeweller, Sorry I'm Not an Architect in 2006 at that same gallery. Her work was exhibited at the TIAF in 2004-2005.
