Brian Mashburn - Present Tense

About

Present Tense, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brian Mashburn, reflects the artist’s interest in our current state of affairs and conflicts and cleavages as they relate to environmental, social and political concerns. This is Mashburn’s first solo exhibition outside the United States. Opening Night: Saturday, Nov 30, from 6pm – 9pm. Free entry. This exhibition runs from December 1 to December 22. It runs concurrently with the solo shows, Annita Maslov's Arcana and Erika Sanada's Hideaway . Mashburn notes that the paintings in Present Tense tend to have a post-apocalyptic feel about them. While this for the most part was not his intention, it is perhaps an understandable side effect of addressing some of the chaos and concerns of our times. For example, research published in the journal Science in September 2019 showed a decline of nearly 3 billion birds across the United States and Canada since 1970. While this research confirmed the fears of many ornithologists, it was striking to Mashburn. The contributing factors are a mixture of climate change, habitat loss and overall human-altered landscapes that are failing to support avifauna across every biome. Several pieces in this series relate to this research and the underlying mechanisms at fault. Mashburn has also been giving a lot of consideration to the polarized nature of discourse surrounding not only political/environmental arguments but also those of ethics, morals and truth that reveal embedded ideologies: how such discourse seems to inevitably devolve to ‘us’ and ‘them’ rather than staying focused on the particular policy or ideal being discussed. He notes that it resembles magnetic repulsion—or oil/water immiscibility—that is to say, more a product of physics than good-faith disagreement. Several pieces in Present Tense were composed with the notion of attraction and repulsion in mind: tree branches cower from industrial backgrounds; fog and detritus coincide, grow and encroach, songbirds residing in v