On view in the Thinkspace office area are new works by Brian Mashburn. A BFA graduate of UNC (Chapel Hill), Mashburn’s oil on canvas works are temporally ambiguous and brooding, suspended somewhere between a familiar past and troubling future. His landscapes simultaneously capture a Gothic sensibility while implying the insolvent cynicism of an apocalyptic vision.

Romantic and expansive in their suggestion of a 19th century sublime, with bare slender trees and atmospheric skies, the works are at once undeniably bleak with their suggestion of ravaged industrial landscapes looming in the distance. The artist stages an irreconcilable tension between a conflicted past and an impossible futurity – the simple poetry of the pastoral is intentionally marred by the spectral presence of rampant urbanization.