Tree on Fire Print

Lori Goldberg is a Vancouver Artist whose paintings have been exhibited in Canada, U.S. and in Europe.Collectors of her work include the Canada Art Bank,The City of Vancouver Art Collection and the Interstate Bank, San Francisco.Among her commissions are original paintings for Intrawest Resorts in Whistler B.C; Mont. Tremblant PQ; Kauai, Hawaii; and Palm Desert, California.She currently teaches classes at Emily Carr Universityof Art and Design. Lori Goldberg spends time with the mundane elements of daily life in her work. Through the painted accumulation of this minutiae, a sort of unorthodox history is born on the canvas: one in which the personal, the cultural, the overlooked, and the forgotten seep in and colour what is being pictured. In her Urban Forest series, romantic forested landscape paintings are punctuated with references to pop culture, their surfaces ruptured with swaths of colour and marks that read like textile swatches or graffiti tags. In one, Disney’s Bambi perches on a branch. We cannot understand concepts like nature, romance, and spirituality, the artist reminds us, without our current cultural framework and the baggage that comes with it. 'Deconstructing Nature' and 'Pick up Sticks' requires the viewer to question their role in repairing our planet. Somehow, this makes Goldberg’s landscapes even more evocative. In her body of work entitled Travelogue, geographical places break down into a collection of memories and things. If we were to rely on Goldberg as a historical source, NYC is made up solely of jewelry, booze, and the Frieze Art Fair. According to the artist, another, unnamed place defines itself with a hammer, a beach ball, a pair of shoes, and a giant honey bee. All objects are seen floating amid a variety of lines, smudges and patches of colour that function as visual stand-ins for the diverse sounds of this unnamed place. A collection of things amid a collection of marks. How complex is a place? How simple, really, when distilled to a list of things noticed, remembered, captured? California is a necklace, a blue-yellow-red hacky sack, a couple of rocks. These objects sit on a tranquil aquamarine ground, spaced intermittently, similarly sized, each painted with the same attention to detail. All equally important, all utterly inadequate. Amid the humour and referentiality, there is a sense of earnest and quiet reverence in Goldberg’s work.