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Natalka Husar "Looking at Art"
Natalka at March 31, 2012 opening of "Burden of Innocence" at Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouver
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Natalka Husar "Judgment Night"
Natalka at March 31, 2012 opening of "Burden of Innocence" at Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouve
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Natalka Husar "Looking at Art"
Natalka at March 31, 2012 opening of "Burden of Innocence" at Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouver
It's Saturday March 31st, 2012 at Douglas Udell Gallery, Vancouver and painter Natalka Husar is very much the artiste-on-display at the opening of her show Burden of Innocence: Act 2 and Act 3, as she flits between guests, entertaining and explaining. The narrative-driven works in this exhibition have also been shown at several other galleries across Canada including the McMaster Museum of Art, Tom Thomson Art Gallery and the Mackenzie Art Gallery.
Husar frequently inserts herself in this series of stories-in-oil, often as a nurse and/or stewardess figure. The uniformed nurse represents the artist as both prober and healer of wounds. The stewardess is the artist as cultural shepherd, guiding her audience to an alternate reality.
The nurse and stewardess archetypes appear in Ukraine and Me clasping each other in a lover’s hold in what is a humorous depiction of Husar embracing herself. The image has been carefully added onto a folk painting that Husar found in Ukraine, her ancestral home. The newer figures have been so skillfully painted over top of the older work, it is virtually impossible to see where the latter leaves off and the former begins.
The Ukraine and the changes it has gone through since the Orange Revolution democracy movement are a major theme in Husar’s paintings. A section of the show deals with Ukraine thugs, which Husar calls tongue-in-cheek “Soviet Priesthood”; many clad in leather jackets, heads shaved, cigarettes dangling from mouths, and eyes half-closed in menacing slits.
The painting that wraps up the show is a feast tableau called Looking at Art. Of course the stewardess and the nurse are the feast servers.