November 19, 2009 – January 16, 2010

Co-produced by

McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton

Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph

Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound

Natalka Husar, Burden of Innocence, 2007, oil on rag board

(photo: Michael Rafelson)

ARTIST’S TALK
Thursday, January 14, 6 – 7:30 pm

In this exhibition, Canadian artist Natalka Husar takes her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, into new territory and presents three interwoven, though unresolved narratives, in the form of a history play in three acts.

Act 1 is a narrative on the nature and fate of painting itself. In Nurse and Stew, Husar paints her own image, masked and costumed, to address the surrogate dependency between painter and subject, the cannibalistic relationship between the artist and her muse, and the anachronistic limbo in which painting currently lies.

Act 2’s Trial is a social narrative conceived in terms of art’s power to bring things to light if not to justice. Though it deals with fictitious characters, it is a form of contemporary history painting. Old Soviet-style and new-capitalist corruption collide in the collective of fictive portraits, the wheeler-dealer thugs who are put on trial not as an accusation but as a record of the cultural and psychological damage they have sustained.

Natalka Husar, Looking at Art 2009, oil on rag board, 81 x 102 cm (photo: Michael Rafelson)

Act 3 presents a Banquet in a time warp: Husar merges 1960s North America with a depiction of contemporary Ukraine. The protagonists from the first and second acts reunite in the cumulative canvas Looking at Art. Husar, cast as her dual personae, plays the waiter in her examination of the artist’s role and art’s responsibility vis à vis the social narrative.

NATALKA HUSAR

Natalka Husar was born in New Jersey in 1951 to Ukrainian immigrant parents. In 1973 she graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Fine Arts and moved to Toronto, where she currently works and lives.

Husar has exhibited extensively across North America in both solo and group exhibitions.  She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council,  Canada Council, Toronto Arts Council and SSHRC. In 1992 CBC’s Sunday Arts profiled her work in a half hour television documentary. Her work is in many private and public collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Husar teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design.