Il-Kamra ta’ Fuq in Mqabba remains breeding ground for new artistic talent as it launches a newcomer to the local visual arts scene – Nicole Sciberras Debono, a young artist who is hosting her first solo exhibition themed ‘Lost In The Ether’.
Curated by Art Sweven, the exhibition was launched on the 19th of August and remains open till the 12th of September.
Debono’s debut collection captures intimate and abstruse moments, belonging to either herself or her peers with whom she communicates with through various channels online. She interprets and translates these moments into isolated visual anecdotes through choice in subject matter, narrative, shape, texture, and colour.
“To be ‘lost in the ether’, is to say that one is engrossed in a communication or visual that has no fixture in space or time with no precise location or context,” explains Melanie Erixon from Art Sweven.
“Through her collection ‘Lost in the Ether’ which constitutes her first solo exhibition, Nicole Sciberras Debono brings forward esoteric narratives of a domestic familiarity, with notes on online and para-social relationships, and the reflections of a young woman in a contemporary society.”
Preoccupied by themes such as loneliness and solitude, Debono explores differences between online relationships and ‘real life’ personal relationships against the bakground of ‘social’ age which requires both an understanding of virtual relationships as well as the digital curation of the self.
Born in 1996, Nicole Sciberras Debono works in paint and digital print and her work primarily focuses on portraits and figurative narratives. Her art normally showcases matters of her interest at the time, including people in her life, her surroundings, or any other signs of the times.
Debono works from life and is fascinated by people and everyday objects, and the atmosphere their presence or absence can create. Through her work, she seeks to evoke such atmosphere and experience by depicting her connection with the subject to visually portray how she sees it, to her viewers.
“Nicole’s work is bold and expressive as she strives to make the creative process of painting visible in all of her works. She believes that the process of making art is more telling and important than the result,” concluded Melanie Erixon.
