|
 |
|
|
| | ARTIST NAME: | Rusnak, Tanya | | ACCESSION NUMBER: | 2015.051.001.A-C | | TITLE: | CRYSTALLIZATION AND DRIFT | | DATE: | 2012 | | CATEGORY: | Mixed Media | | MEDIUM: | gouache, graphite, acrylic | | SUPPORT: | vellum | | DIMENSIONS: | Image: 46.2 × 33.2 cm (18 3/16 × 13 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 47.2 × 34.4 cm (18 9/16 × 13 9/16 in.)
Frame: 66.7 × 52.6 × 3.4 cm (26 1/4 × 20 11/16 × 1 5/16 in.) | | COLLECTION: | Alberta Foundation for the Arts |
|
 |
| | OTHER HOLDINGS: | Rusnak, Tanya | | ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Tanya Rusnak’s mixed-media installations represent an ongoing exploration of time, memory and the event, raising issues of history and how we remember. Her art education includes an exchange year at l’École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, France, and an MFA with Distinction in Mixed Media, from the University of Calgary, in 2005. Tanya works with found artifacts and other objects of historical, cultural, artistic or scientific importance to reanimate materials in new and interesting ways that describe the ghostly presence or vanishing qualities of those objects. Her work explores archivization, the recovery of the lost subject through ritualistic accumulation, the optics of perception, and the boundaries between the seen and the unseen.
Drawing on her own heritage, O Emigratsii (On Emigration) constitutes a memorial to the history of early Ukrainian immigration to Canada. Partly a work of mourning, lamenting the loss of individual and cultural lives, the installation preserves fragments of early immigrant recollections, displayed within hundreds of glass and wooden boxes and on altar-like shelving systems. This project to “awaken the dead” includes text fragments, relics, pseudo-relics, paintings, photos and organic materials (grain and flour, sunflowers, mud hut remnants) to evoke the texture of the immigrant experience. It was exhibited during the 1990s in Saskatoon (Mendel Art Gallery), Regina (Neutral Ground Gallery) and Winnipeg (Ukrainian Cultural & Educational Centre), as well as the then-Edmonton Art Gallery and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), Lethbridge. Tanya also created archives for an exhibition in Charlottetown, PEI: Narratives of Nationhood, About Emigration.
Tanya has participated in several group exhibits in Calgary, as well as in the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art of 2005 at the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery; in Grande Prairie, Montreal and Charlottetown. Her works in shows such as The Grey Film of Dust (TrépanierBaer, Calgary, 2004), On the Phenomenology of Twilight (Little Gallery, Calgary, 2005) and Screening and Décor (Illingworth Kerr, Calgary, 2014) evoke the aura of objects that have weathered the passage of time and other signifiers of transience.
Tanya is a drawing instructor at ACAD; her work is housed in national and international collections, including in Strasbourg, France.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|