Drawing on her northwest environs and devotion to colour, Meghan Hildebrand paints vivid landscapes bursting with life – at times chaotic, always resilient and ever shifting. Merging representation with imagination, she constructs worlds that are richly abundant yet never untouched by the reach of human activity. 

Shifting between the illusion of depth and abstraction of surface, Meghan creates scenes layered with visual motifs. The symbols act as an index, connecting paintings within a series and over time, and can be read in a variety of ways. Multi-coloured dots nod to the visual colour mixing of the Pointillists while also suggesting areas of interest on a digital map, or floating buoys. Line-work bubbles at once suggest dialogue or smoke stacks. Glittering ghosts can symbolize the presence of spirits, while referencing an 80’s childhood highlighted by arcade games. Giant pinecones replace trees – one of the ways the artist distorts scale and perspective – to create scenes where upon closer examination, logic collapses, and things are not quite what they seem.

Born in Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1978, Meghan was raised within a community of artists. Encouraged from an early age, she has long been motivated to express her experience of the world, the small-town slice of Canada between the Yukon and the Sunshine Coast of BC where she now resides.