Danielle Englesby at Kelowna Community Theatre
1375 Water Street, Kelowna
January 14th – April 2nd, 2016
Danielle Englesby is primarily an abstract painter that works in various unconventional medias-combining her eclectic stylization with her love of organic mark-making. Her artistic pursuits originated through a desire to create works that fostered the expression of raw emotion and stimulated a cathartic creative process where a meditative state could be achieved through art-making. As her practice became further refined, her work began to shift from an intrinsic state to incorporating external environmental influences- which resulted in abstract paintings that conveyed communal messages through mood and intensity.
Her recent pieces are a result of investigational research surrounding the interaction of various combinations of man-made and organic materials- keeping in mind the objective of translating the notion of the passage of time associated with ruination. These experiments resulted in the use of industrial paint, spray paint, oil, sawdust, marble, and chalk to create a desired aesthetic effect- an attempt to embody the nature of metal and stone. Weathered walls that have been marked by various people over a prolonged duration of time illustrates the ways in which durable synthetic material reacts to exposure to the natural cycle of decay, while simultaneously acting as documentation of societal history. To highlight this concept, she aims to capture the marks made by these various 
materials in a manner that evokes a mood of transient obscurity and connects the viewer to the dark and powerful nature of raw material.
She hopes that these current pieces function as a reminder of how meaning and significance can be found in undesirable aspects of our environment, and how what is over-looked can represent the defining features of a contemporary public.