Members Gallery
Nightfall
Stephanie Vegh
Exhibition: September 4th - October 26, 2024
Opening Reception: September 6th, 2024 7 - 9 pm
About the Exhibition
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years to explore the visual experience of Hamilton’s Starlite Drive-In – Canada’s first drive-in movie theatre and an outdated cultural phenomenon that saw a resurgence in popularity during the pandemic.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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-born visual artist, writer and arts worker who obtained her Combined Honours BA in Art and Comparative Literature from McMaster University before completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. She served as Artist-in-Residence at the Repton School in Derbyshire, England and has written essays and reviews for various galleries and publications in the United Kingdom and Canada. Her drawings and installation projects have been exhibited at public art galleries across Canada and the UK including a 2018 solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Vegh is the recipient of multiple Ontario Arts Council grants and was awarded the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Arts Management in 2016 for her six years of leadership of the Hamilton Arts Council (2011-2017). She continues to live and create art in Hamilton while serving as Head of Learning at the Art Gallery of Burlington.