Natalka Husar: Burden of Innocence
30 April 2011 – 5 September 2011
With Burden of Innocence, Canadian artist Natalka Husar takes her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, into new territory and presents three interwoven narratives in the form of a history play in three acts.
In Act 1, Husar paints her own image, masked and costumed, to address the dependency between painter and subject and the anachronistic limbo in which painting currently lies.
Act 2 deals with fictitious characters that include 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 that Ukraine has sustained.
Act 3 represents a banquet, in which the protagonists from the first and second acts reunite. 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.
Events
Studio Sunday
Mapping Overlapping Stories
15 October 2023
Fundraising Event
MacKenzie Gala
20 October 2023
Opening Reception
Prairie Interlace: Opening and Curator Conversation
3 November 2023