SCANNING A LIFE
Baba’s House is a beautiful portrait
Imagine you invite artists into your home, give them free rein of your cupboards and drawers, and they produce artwork using your possessions as material.
Each item was brought into your home with purpose — however meaningful or not.
Some may have been in the bottoms of drawers for years.
Anything could be unearthed, its history and connection to you is on display.
Photos of people with forgotten names, pencils collected from vacations, keys whose usefulness have disappeared with the knowledge of their function, forgotten ephemera, everyday objects and even your condiments. For many, this would be a nightmare. It became the basis for a project on display at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada.
In 2012, artists Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey created a self-imposed residency in the house of Kozak’s Baba, Sophie Ostrowski, in Creighton, Sask., about 530 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon on the Manitoba border.
During the residency they had rules. While helping Ostrowski sort through her belongings they were not to alter or damage anything they used. In the end some things were altered — as would happen if pickles were poured over them.
Each artwork was created by placing the items on a scanner with no photoshop trickery. Most of them consist of two seemingly unrelated items, or groups of items composed into what I originally described as collages. Durey corrected me in an email. “We wanted the scans to read more as arrangements rather than collage,” he wrote. I stand corrected. I now see the difference. While collages are created by tearing, cutting and combining different images, these works are created by arranging whole items on the scanner bed to create a new composition.
The residency produced a prolific amount of work.
BABA’S HOUSE Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey curated by Blair Fornwald Ukrainian Museum of Canada until Aug. 30