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Tanya Rusnak

 

  • third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian
  • lives in Calgary, Alberta


A third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, Tanya Rusnak considers O Emigratsii, a mixed media installation she began in 1993, to be an ongoing project of recovery focussing on Ukrainians who immigrated to Canada prior to World War I. Its inception began with trips to old Ukrainian settlements in northern Alberta, from which Rusnak recovered archaeological remnants. Incorporating paintings, archival photographs, found objects and 400 glass boxes containing silk-screened texts, Rusnak engages in a creative re-collection of the Ukrainian-Canadian immigrant experience by situating the late twentieth-century viewer within the racist ethno-centric climate of early twentieth-century western Canada. The lower half of the gallery walls have been painted blue, a colour reminiscent of the shade of washing blueing and mud plaster applied to the walls of early settler's homes. The wooden boxes in the installation have been engraved with Ukrainian symbols and words such as "Muzyk" (peasant), "Zemlia" (earth) and Black Sea, referrants linking Ukrainian-Canadian immigrants to a common Ukrainian connection to agriculture. O Emigratsii resonates with the voices and stories of Ukrainian immigrants recounting their impoverished living conditions and hardships. Rusnak named the installation O Emigratsii after the title of a book written by Joseph Oleskiw, a Ukrainian agriculturalist who endeavoured to dispel many of the myths and misleading information that painted Canada as an agricultural paradise. The white paintings included in the installation are emblematic of the old Ukrainian headstones, the last vestiges of these first Ukrainian settlements that Rusnak had seen throughout her childhood. Rusnak’s creative production is impelled by her commitment to retrieving "the signs symbols, broken narratives and persisting words of the early Ukrainian immigrant" (Bruce Grenville, 1995).

 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1997-5 O Emigratsii (On Emigration)
Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta; Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Neutral Ground, Regina, Saskatchewan

 



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beatty, Greg. "O Emigratsii: Tanya Rusnak."  Artichoke 9, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 40-43.

Canadian Art 13, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 25.

Grenville, Bruce. "Tanya Rusnak." Canadian Art 12, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 93.

 

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