Congratulations Emelie Robertson

---

Emelie Robertson “Sightlines” @ artLAB, John Labatt Visual Arts Centre until June 4.

Congratulations to Emelie Robertson and her upcoming year-end MFA thesis exhibition at Western University.  Over the past two years Robertson has worked toward her MFA where she has explored how memory is tied to material expression.  Interested in the perception of place through memory, Robertson’s paintings simulate the emotional and optic experience of feeling connected and disconnected in nature.

“Sightlines” suggests a confluence of meeting points approached through multiple entries, navigating a delicate tension between material, memory, perception, and place. Within these works, the painted surface becomes a threshold for movement and observation, where perception entangles with intuition, recollection, and material. Meaning emerges through the act of making itself: a thought or memory carried through gesture and repetition, requiring both close observation and a submission to the materials’ own agency.

This process, as a form of perceptual exchange, creates a rhythm in which time collapses, coalesces, and transforms—like walking through a forest, and like memory itself. The works remain in constant negotiation between proximity and distance, perception and expression, stillness and movement, matter and intuition, clarity, and obscurity. In doing so, they reflect an artist working through her own emotional and entangled relationship to forests, trees, water, and the unresolved histories and responsibilities carried by the land, which continue to shape how it is seen, felt, and inhabited.