The Hills, in pastels

There is something of the Mona Lisa in Lauren Conrad’s signature half-smile, hovering between certain boredom and smug knowingness. We’d just never realized it until last week, when we heard that The Hills are alive again, and in portraiture? No kidding: Karin Bubaš (karinbubas.ca), a Vancouver artist known for photographic work, has created a whole series of drawings of TV’s favourite California girls—mascara running, collagen lips trembling, looks killing from across da club.

This is pop art for a post-pop-art generation. Or, if you took philosophy instead of art history, think of it as a Baudrillardian hyperreality show: the soft-focus simulacra of already-simulated lives, those long female gazes drawn out, then re-drawn out in pretty pretty colours. Meta, in pastels.

Before this, Bubaš did a watercolour series based on the trashtastic ’80s soap Dynasty. But it’s not bad acting that compels her; rather, she tells us, “there’s a raw emotional beauty that makes for interesting study.”

She was also inspired, while in Paris last fall, by Le mystère et l’éclat, a “fantastic pastel show” at Musée d’Orsay.

“I’d been thinking about doing some sort of ambitious painting or drawing project for some time, and when I saw the exhibition I realized that I had to give soft pastel some serious consideration,” says Bubaš.  “The raw pigment seemed to glow off the paper in a magical way. I think it has been an undervalued medium.

“Also, there is something about a painted or drawn portrait that has an emotional resonance that a photographic portrait does not.”

If the artist is saying she’s painted a more believable set of feelings than our dear Hills starlets could ever hope to summon: we’ve got to agree. The exhibit, slyly titled With Friends Like These…,  opens tomorrow, July 28, at 7:30 p.m. and runs to September 13 at the Charles H. Scott Gallery (Emily Carr University, 1399 Johnston Street, 604-844-3809, chscott.ecuad.ca).

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