“I’m interested in how paintings can hold and carry multiple meanings; paintings that can create a volume that is not inhabited, but one that is imagined and exists on the surface.” — Ella Gonzales

Reflection of a Window can be understood as a site of many dwellings. Ella Gonzales’ practice involves a layered and complicated narrative of migration. Her paintings are deeply rooted in familial memory and lived experience, yet waver between abstract and representational in their composition. Gonzales’ ongoing process involves imagining combinations and altered architectural features of houses and spaces that she and her family have lived in since migrating from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia to Canada.

While referencing family photos and home videos, her paintings resemble the tricky nature of memory: where the spaces that feel so familiar can suddenly fall out of focus, or gradually bleed into one another, over time. Painting on thin and semi-transparent jusi and piña silks, the light travels through the artist’s thin layers of paint, diluted and soaked into the surface and creating a mirror image on their reverse. Scenes of “home” become abstracted into empty rooms that no longer resemble their referential counterparts.

Reflection of a Window opened in the Window Gallery on February 1, 2022.