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Solastalgia showcased at Parkside Gallery

Corey Hardeman brings her unique landscape paintings to 100 Mile House

Landscapes and our connections to them are explored at Parkside Gallery this month in Solastalgia.

Consisting of a dozen oil paintings from Prince George-based artist Corey Hardeman, the show features scenes based on her childhood in Halifax and her current home in B.C. Hardeman said she wanted to create a set of paintings that invoked both a sense of grief but also hope.

Solastalgia is a word coined in the early 2000s by a philosopher named Glen Albrecht.

“It’s not just a sense of grief but a sense of environmental change violating your connection with your home place,” Hardeman said. “I think that my work really connects with that concept.”

Hardeman said that with the anniversary of the 2021 wildfire season upon us there are few people who haven’t been touched by environmental change in B.C. While she wanted to display that grief in her paintings, she also wanted them to be “little love letters to places I care about.”

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The natural world is an endless source of inspiration for her paintings, she added.

Over the last 15 years since she’s been painting professionally, Hardeman said she’s learned how to use colour to invoke emotion and motion in her work. She doesn’t consider herself a traditional landscape artist but has developed a talent for incorporating abstract elements into her landscapes to give them an “inverted” nature.

“I don’t tend to paint landscapes that have that distant horizon line or a pastoral overlook. I tend to paint what I think of as more intimate and physically moving landscapes.”

One of Hardeman’s favourite paintings in the show is a seascape entitled Night, which highlights an Atlantic ocean wave as seen at night. She thinks its colours turned out especially striking compared with her other oceanic paintings.

Her favourite B.C.-based painting is Hunter, which depicts a full moon shining over a thicket of trees. Hidden within the painting is a fox.

Every painting in Solastalgia was painted in 2022 specifically for the show, some so recently they’re still “wet off the easel,” she said.

Hardeman will usually get an idea or concept in her head and will paint several different paintings based on it.

“Each painting tends to inform the next. I work on four or five pieces at a time and they talk to each other while I’m working on them.”

Hardeman said she hopes people who look at her paintings will come away knowing that it’s OK to love where you live and to care for the environment. This is her first time showing in 100 Mile House.

“I’ve been shown and collected internationally and I feel pretty lucky I get to do this for a living,” Hardeman said. “I was born with it. I’ve always painted and I’ve always drawn as a way of connecting with the world.”

Solastalgia runs at Parkside Gallery from July 2- 23. Hardeman said she plans to host a tea and reception on the final day of the show to answer any questions.



patrick.davies@100milefreepress.net

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Patrick Davies

About the Author: Patrick Davies

An avid lover of theatre, media, and the arts in all its forms, I've enjoyed building my professional reputation in 100 Mile House.
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