Troubling dreams featured in Truro’s Odd Jobs exhibit
Brandt Eisner is a lumberjack, fortune teller, clown, storm chaser and more in a new show at the Marigold Cultural Centre.
Eisner collaborated with Susan Malmstrom to create images where people are working in distorted settings, where facets of social and environmental disasters appear. Eisner portrays all characters.
“We’re dealing with very surrealistic environments, and everything in the pictures has significance,” he said.
“Susan and I came up with the concepts together. She’s in California so there was a lot of back and forth to get the vision.”
After they worked with ideas and scenes, Malmstrom edited and produced the final works using digital media.
The art shows troubling dreams that people connected with various jobs might experience, as well as occupational hazards, and issues that concern much of society.
In one, a lumberjack stands amongst tree stumps. The trees are gone but a picture of trees hangs on a wall behind him. In Barbarians at the Gate someone is on a computer at one end of a table while a dejected librarian, surrounded by books, is at the other.
Hunter Versus Hunted has an exterminator faced with a gigantic hairy spider.
“It’s a lot of fun,” said Eisner. “We have so many ideas for more. I’d like to do a series of jobs that no longer exist and one of fantasy jobs.”
The Nova Scotia Art Bank has purchased two works of art that are included in the exhibit.
“It’s my first anything in the Art Bank so that’s really exciting,” said Eisner.
He encourages people to drop by the show’s opening reception, in the Maclellan Moffatt Financial Art Gallery, at the Marigold Cultural Centre, on Saturday, Jan. 12, from 6-8 p.m. The works will remain on display until the end of the month.