Nightfall

Stephanie Vegh

Over the past fifteen years, my practice has focused on diminutive signs of disaster through history, from the decline of honeybee populations to the role of rats as medieval plague carriers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I returned to oil painting for the first time in fifteen years to explore the visual experience of Hamilton’s Starlite Drive-In – Canada’s first drive-in movie theatre and an outdated cultural phenomenon that saw a resurgence in popularity during the pandemic.

In these intimately scaled works, based on images photographed with an iPhone camera over seven years of visits, miniature cinematic scenes from a variety of theatrical blockbusters are suspended like jewel boxes against dramatic skies that enhance the light pollution from the expanding suburban sprawl of Stoney Creek. Below the horizon line of these compositions, shadowed hints of cars and headlights lurk in the night as subtle reminders of the everyday comforts and pleasures that contribute to the changing light and climate that collide at this nostalgic site.