Natalka Husar: Burden of Innocence

February 11 to April 18, 2010

For the exhibition Burden of Innocence, celebrated Canadian artist Natalka Husar took her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, into new territory and presented 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.

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 are united in the cumulative canvas Looking at Art (detail pictured at right). 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: Burden of Innocence was a curatorial collaboration between the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, McMaster Museum of Art, and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, and was organized by the MSAC for circulation through Southern Ontario and to Regina, Saskatchewan. Before coming to Guelph, Burden of Innocence premiered at the McMaster Museum of Art (fall 2009). The exhibition continues to Museum London (summer 2010), Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound (winter 2011), and MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (spring/summer 2011).

In support of the exhibition, the MSAC is producing a major publication on the work of Natalka Husar. The book is edited by Judith Nasby and features essays by Katerina Atanassova, Gerta Moray, Dawn Owen, Carol Podedworny, Stuart Reid, and Meeka Walsh. The book will be launched at the MSAC in spring 2010.

Husar has also published a limited edition artist book featuring full colour reproductions of her paintings and the writings of Janice Kulyk Keefer (author and professor at the University of Guelph). Their collaboration began on a journey to Ukraine in 2005. Despite their North American birth, both Husar and Kulyk Keefer have a deep connection to the country and culture that shaped the lives of their parents and profoundly influenced their upbringing. Their journey into the social, political, and cultural vortex of today’s Ukraine has resulted in an extraordinary artist book, which is also available for purchase at the MSAC’s information desk.
 

Exhibition Opening

Thursday, February 11 at 6 pm
 

Catch a free bus to and from the opening!

A bus was available from the Ontario College of Art & Design (100 McCaul Street at Dundas, Toronto) at 4:30 pm and arrived at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (Guelph) at 6pm. The bus departed from the MSAC at 8 pm and returned to the pick-up location in front of OCAD. Hosting was provided by the Nurse and Stew on the journey to and from Guelph
 

Images:
Right: Boss, 2008 (oil on rag board, 46 x 41 cm), Collection of the Artist
Left: Looking at Art, 2009 (oil on rag board, 81 x 102 cm), Collection of the Artist