Miriam El Abbassi | Arts Editor
Featured Image: This collaboration spotlights both artists feelings of disconnect, using various forms of abstract imagery. | Miriam El Abbassi
The [Un]natural Spaces collection is brought to the York community by students Daniela Miranda and Adriana Monteleone. This collaboration spotlights both artists feelings of disconnect, using various forms of abstract imagery.
According to the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design (AMPD): “Miranda’s work focuses on the artificiality that has tainted natural spaces, so much that ‘wild’ nature, no longer exists, and her work seeks to portray the longing for more natural spaces.” This is evident when walking through the gallery. Miranda’s work, in contrast to Monteleone’s, focuses on a more natural setting, exploring how man-made elements have essentially invaded, and almost overtaken, that space.
The paintings are arranged in a straight line, going across all four walls in the space, almost as if there is some kind of planned narrative the artists are trying to convey. It starts out with one of Miranda’s paintings, and then one of Monteleone’s, and then alternates across the walls.
Miranda’s first painting, on a set of two canvases, depicts a neon pink bridge wrapping its way through a forest. The neon motifs, clearly used to depict human intervention into natural spaces, are present in every painting of Miranda’s.
It creates a slight unsettling feeling, as it is very evident that those elements are not supposed to be there. Although this helps to enforce Miranda’s notion of “fake nature” in natural spaces, and how much control society has in the ways they can experience it.
In contrast, the subject of Monteleone’s paintings are placed in a more urban setting, “Monteleone’s acrylic paintings portray the claustrophobia felt by someone who experiences modern society, which, despite its urban charm, can easily become a threatening environment when one is faced with being one of the many people that inhabit it,” states the AMPD website.
This feeling of claustrophobia is emphasized by the composition of the paintings, which feature a collage-like technique, helping to create a disoriented feeling within the viewer. Monteleone’s first painting depicts a lecture hall on York’s Keele Campus, which is incredibly crowded, and features the “Keele Campus” sign and campus mascot. The painting, however, is not a clear depiction of a lecture hall, and looks as if one took a photograph, cut it up into pieces, rearranged the pieces and that became the reference for the final piece. This kind of composition helps to enforce the themes in Monteleone’s work.
Located at the Gales Gallery in the Accolade West building, [Un]natural Spaces prompts us to think about our own impact on the natural world, and become more conscious of how we interact with those spaces, as well as how we interact with the urban spaces we see day to day.
