Viola Ilia draws inspiration from routine day-to-day scenery and transforms these seemingly ordinary passageways into treasured colourful jewels in paint. Born in Albania and now living in Canada she uses influences from both her childhood days in Tirana and her early adulthood days travelling in Ontario. Working with acrylic paint and gouache on wood panels, she captures the essence and rhythm of the fleeting countryside, a lonesome highway, or an empty gas station. Ilia explores the duality between ordinary and extraordinary, monotonous and wondrous, dull and invigorating. Her work aims to capture these everyday empty unremarkable places and give the viewer a new enlivening way of looking at the world around them through the beauty of colours.