Spirited solo

Artist Amber Albrecht on the apocalypse,
the allure of plumbing and what influences her enchanted drawings

THE WORLD WITHOUT US: “Home From the Hill”

by SACHA JACKSON

“I think a lot about the apocalypse. That sense of not being able to do anything, about being trapped.” This is, in part, what influences Amber Albrecht’s work, intricate ink, pen and brush drawings that evoke a sense of calm foreboding. There are no explosions, no barren landscapes; instead, her work is full of nature, of things taking root, houses overrun with brambles and ghostly, girlish characters occupying the space between the here and the there. “It’s sort of on the boundary between fantasy and restraint. The restraint is my anxiety,” she says, smiling.

Born and raised in B.C., Albrecht moved to Montreal in 2001 to study fine arts at Concordia. Since graduating in 2005, she’s exhibited in group shows throughout the country, but Demarcations, which opened at Division Gallery last Saturday, is her first solo show.

“As a kid, I pretty much did everything. I played sports, I was good at math and science and art, but I never really saw myself as an artist. When I was about 12, a friend of mine had a poster with very realistic deer on it that her 16-year-old cousin had drawn and it was amazing to me that a 16-year-old could have that kind of talent. I realize that it’s possible now, but at the time, it seemed like she was just this amazing artist. I never looked at what I was doing in that way.”

Even now, she sometimes thinks about other things she could have done, like being a plumber (“I fixed the toilet the other day,”) or an accountant. “I’ve always liked math—it’s just like a puzzle and I really like puzzles and patterns.” Looking at her work, you get a sense of that, that much of her work is a puzzle, a maze that she’s created for and solved herself, and, like puzzles, her work is both contained and intricate.

She may have traded in the sea and mountains for a distinctly urban setting but the natural surroundings associated with the West Coast is one of the most evocative things about her work. Mixed with that sense of scenery are the dark fairy tales and folklore of Eastern Europe with their enchanted forests, morality tales and “don’t go there” houses. Of the dreamier aspects of her work, houses in particular are a reoccurring theme, one that has a direct link to her personal experience.

“When I was 17, I started recording my dreams and I have a bunch of old notebooks at my parents’ house just filled with them. I went through them once and there was something like 35 nightmares and a lot of them were about houses. It’s always a different house and I’ll always go into the house and sometimes I’ll fall through the floorboards, or head up to the attic and there’s usually some type of spirit involved.”

Lately she’s been branching out into concept design and recently worked on the album artwork for the latest releases by Toronto’s Reverie Sound Revue and Ohbijou, and even contributed images to music blog Said the Gramophone, inspired by Ottawa’s The Constellations. But work like this is more about the satisfaction of getting to work with artists she admires than the pay or the recognition, though admittedly, that’s nice too.

With any art, what it’s ultimately about is connecting with an audience and a public, and Albrecht understands that “There’s a sense of trying to connect with others and being trapped inside of yourself.”

DEMARCATIONS IS AT DIVISION
GALLERY (372 STE-CATHERINE W.,
#311) UNTIL APRIL 4