Laura Douglas is an Art Education student at Concordia. She lives in Montreal and grew up on a small rural island in Ontario, surrounded by farmland and lakes. Her work deals with human influence on the environment and vice versa, as well as memories of childhood wonder, and projections of possible futures for humanity. Her paintings, installations, and textile works have been exhibited in group shows in both Ontario and Quebec, including at Concordia’s VAV Gallery and as part of the Art Matters Festival, and have appeared in several online and print publications. Her work is forthcoming in this year’s Art Matters Festival.

Artist Statement:  The paintings in this show are amalgamated from two series on similar themes. The Radiant Forest is an ongoing painting series exploring an alternate reality/potential future in which a non-dominant human-like species exists as just another creature on earth. The earth, the plants, and the people often glow: due to pollution leftover from the present, or simply because without industrial civilization, the world is that lush and green.

The second series these works are drawn from is entitled Paintings of a Home and deals with nostalgia and the unreliability of memory. The references for these works are a mixture of images from my childhood, memories, and visions from dreams. In each work, the original, realistic reference picture is deliberately obscured, altered, or mystified, revealing an image that feels truer to memory.