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Before Teresa Posyniak turned her attention to visual art, she travelled South America extensively.
It was more than 50 years ago and she was in her late teens and early 20s during that period. She began in Peru, initially to teach English as a second language, before heading to Bolivia. She made and sold jewelry with Argentine craftspeople, learned how to speak Spanish and eventually discovered a love of drawing. She lived in the slums, which included a stint in Buenos Aires, and eventually embarked on a motorcycle trek across Argentina.
“The idea was to go back up to Canada on a motorcycle, a 1949 500 that fell apart,” says Posyniak, 73. “So we just hitchhiked, me and just a bunch of craftsmen, up the coast of South America and Chile. I was in Chile for a while.”
At that point, Salvador Allende was still in charge but was ousted during a 1973 military coup that led to nearly two decades of horror under dictator Augusto Pinochet.
“The Chilean friends I met in Santiago disappeared,” Posyniak says. “They were gone. I went back to Canada in late 1972 with the idea of settling my affairs and trying to emigrate to Chile. I wanted to go to university there. All my friends were gone, disappeared and murdered.”
At that point, Posyniak had not decided to become an artist. She returned to Regina and eventually began teaching high school drama and English before finally deciding, at the age of 27, to study art at the University of Regina and later got her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary. But what happened to her friends in South America “left an indelible mark,” she says.
“I was into social justice before,” she says. “I come from a family that was very political in that way who raised me to believe if you see a problem and can do something about it – you can participate in helping out – you do. That’s been the course of my life.”
In the introduction to Resilience, a career-spanning exhibit currently on display at the University of Calgary’s Nickle Galleries, Posyniak is described as an artist, activist and teacher. There are thematic threads throughout the work – social justice and environmental awareness – although the artist has used an astonishing variety of mediums and disciplines to convey them.
The earliest work are lithographs of people in crowds from 1980 when Posyniak was still an art student in Regina. In a display case at Nickle, those works accompany 2005 War Zone, an oil, encaustic and wood piece from a series based on the war in Bosnia. There is also a figurative painting in the case called Pregnant Pause.
On a wall nearby is a collection of haunting oil and mixed-media paintings from 1990 that she created not long after the 1989 Montreal massacre where a gunman claimed the lives of 14 women. There are also works reflecting a five-year period when the artist worked with poet Nancy Holmes for a series based on ponderosa pines near Kelowna. The pieces, which use oil, wax and birch, reflect the artist’s interest in the environment. Resilience is an evolving installation made up of 24 2.4-metre-tall vertical sculptures wrapped in handmade felt that are meant to convey a collection of “limbs, wounds, scars, corals, plankton, veins and fascia.”
“I tend to focus on things that are highly textural, that look like they are either falling apart or they are growing: Growth and decay,” she says. “That whole sense of duality, contrasting concrete with silk, concrete with lace, steel with lace.”
While she initially focused on painting when she arrived at the U of C, she eventually turned to sculpture. Her first supervisor was Harry Kiyooka, an accomplished painter and printmaker who died in 2022. He was followed by Ray Arnatt, a British-born sculptor and instructor.
“Having Harry and then Ray, who believed in unbridled exploration, was just such a stroke of luck as opposed to having somebody who would say ‘You should be doing this’ or ‘You should be doing that’ or ‘Don’t do this.’ It was none of that. So I just kind of blew up. I worked on a massive installation for my MFA piece. That’s the last time I showed at the Nickle, in 1983.”
That installation was named Sanctuary and it consisted of steel, handmade felt and paper, silk, concrete, hemp and wood. It became a work in progress, continuing to evolve throughout the 1980s. Three of the verticals from that piece are now integrated into Resilience, the centrepiece of the new exhibit and one that reflects the artist’s growing concern with environmental matters.
Alanna Mitchell, a former Globe and Mail journalist and author who writes about environmental issues and is an old friend from Regina, sent Posyniak a book about plankton, microscopic organisms that are carried by tides and currents in the ocean.
“I looked at these pictures and said these look like lace,” she says. “Some look like the Eiffel Tower, some look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, geodesic domes. I love connections with people, with community, with everything. I kind of look at everything all at once, sometimes to my detriment because I get distracted. She said, ‘Did you know that plankton is responsible for more than half the Earth’s oxygen?’ They are a byproduct of photosynthesis. Plants, trees, and grasses do the rest. I thought, wow, they are so beautiful. Thinking in terms of form and function: their form is beautiful, their function is crucial. Then I was thinking, too, about what’s inside us, our cells, our nerve bundles, our sinew, or fascia. All of that has these structures that relate very much to microscopic structures, architectural structures. So I started using lace in my columns. That started 15 years ago. “
Posyniak is well-known for her large installations. Most recently, she was commissioned to create a 1.8-by-7.3-metre tapestry recently installed at the new BMO Centre, which is part of a series of work she did called Entanglement that features close-ups of prairie grass. Her best-known work, however, sits not far from the Nickle Galleries at the Faculty of Law’s Murray Fraser Hall. The two-metre-high sculpture, named Lest We Forget, is made of paper, wood, foam and Styrofoam and was unveiled in 1994 on the fifth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. The names and ages of the 14 women murdered in Montreal are included in the piece, as are 121 names and ages of other women killed in Canada.
At the time of the Montreal killings, Posyniak’s daughter was just six months old and her son was two. Motherhood was a “game changer” for her as an artist, she says. In practical terms, she had less time for art but creatively she became more focused.
“Until then, I was dealing with subject matter that I was really passionate about I think in kind of an oblique way,” she says. “They are alluding to this or to that, but nothing really overt. When I had children, I don’t know I just felt like I had to come out more, I had to be stronger. While I don’t believe in art that gives messages, there were some things that I thought needed to have stronger associations with what I was talking about. The Montreal massacre happened in 1989. My second child, a daughter, was six months old and I thought ‘I’ve got to find another way.’”
The Art Canada Institute named Resilience as one of 12 must-see exhibitions for the fall. While the show has a bit of a retrospective feel, it only scrapes the surface of the hundreds of works that Nickle’s curators pored over for the show.
“The theme of Resilience is a big one,” she says. “Looking back, I never thought vulnerability and resilience would be an over-arching theme. But these things come to you the longer you work, the harder you work. These things emerge. I will probably go back to working with the human figure as well. I have no shortage of ideas.”
Resilience runs until Dec. 14 at Nickle Galleries. Teresa Posyniak will give tours of the exhibit at noon on Oct. 24 and Nov. 19.
With files from Chris Nelson, Postmedia News