| Barbara Dellar (Northampton, Massachusetts) paints in oil. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, Dellar wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
Her paintings establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence (Native Shaman with Spirit Guides). By referencing romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humor and symbolism, she investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Her work is a hybrid of factual realities and fabricated illusions to conjure the realms of our imagination. Dellar’s works often appear as dreamlike images (Heaven’s Gate, Ghost Wolf) in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way (Garden Pathway), she creates work through labor-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle. Her works are often classified as part of the new Romantic Movement because of the desire for the local in the unfolding globalized world. However, this reference is not intentional, as this kind of art is part of the collective memory. Barbara Dellar currently lives and works in Montreal. |
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