November 19, 2016 – November 19, 2017
New York-born Nova Scotia-based painter Emily Falencki mines the ground between traditional portraiture and anonymous representation. Falencki’s memorial portraits of missing persons give voice to grief and question society’s all-too-hard shell. She finds her source material in newspapers, on the internet or on posters around her neighborhood. The images are so often repeated they can become invisible to those who would see them. Using traditional (read “time-consuming”) painting techniques including layers of rabbit skin glue and hand sanding, Falencki commits to giving meaning to those faces, painting their likeness, and demanding attention for those lost close and far from home.
Recently, Emily Falencki has been working with text, vestiges of family correspondence and images that plumb the depth of personal and anonymous relationships.
