Lisa Urbanic
Lisa Urbanic
Lisa Urbanic is a Canadian artist who creates highly symbolic drawings by combining charcoal and pastels to create layered domestic spaces. Her interiors are often ambiguous and evoke a sense of private spaces of spirituality, memory, and desire. She uses these spaces to explore the problematics of representations of the female body and the instability of identity.
Urbanic’s early charcoal drawings feature elaborate high-contrast interiors, often depicting dark church corners. Rendered heavily in black, these images are solemn and evoke a sense of melancholy. Urbanic later introduced pastels into her work, layering carefully selected pigments over her black and white drawings. This layered effect creates a sense of shifting spaces and echoes the passing of time. Her purposeful use of blues and reds is reminiscent of stained-glass windows in French cathedrals and evokes the spiritual.
Often appearing in sparse interiors, the chair is a recurring object in Urbanic’s drawings that she uses to symbolize women. Depicting womanhood through the chair, she explores the idea of women as objects while evading explicit sexualization. Using disrupted domestic objects, such as an unmade bed, to evoke the physical absence of women, Urbanic explores the instability of female identities and their links to domesticity.
Urbanic obtained an Associate of the Ontario College of Art and Design Diploma (AOCA) in Fine Art from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts from York University in 1994.