Burk exhibiting work for Canada’s sesquicentennial celebration

Amanda Burk, associate professor, in the department of fine and performing arts is exhibiting her work in an ambitious art exhibition, titled The Perspective From Here: 150 Artists From the North, marking Canada’s sesquicentennial at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.

The gallery is gathering works by 150 artists for the exhibition to celebrate and demonstrate the artistic breadth, diversity, and excellence of artists who live, or have lived, in the North. 

The Perspective From Here: 150 Artists From the North opens Friday, June 23, and runs until September 24, 2017.

Burk is exhibiting her drawing, Sitting just beneath the surface.

Sitting just beneath the surface is a recent drawing from an ongoing body of work that Burk has been developing called Stories of Contentment and Other Fables. This series of large-scale charcoal drawings uses animal imagery to speak about lived experience and our own animal nature. In particular, Burk is focused on exploring our aggressive impulses and feelings of restlessness and is interested in the struggle between the destructive potential of aggression and its connection to a personal sense of agency.

"I am thrilled to have been asked to submit work to this survey exhibition and to show alongside a diverse and talented set of artists from the North,” said Burk. "Perspectives From Here will be a revealing and fascinating look at what it means to live in the North. Before moving North, I thought of Northern Ontario as a quiet and relaxing place, but my own experience living here has been quite different from that. There is a palpable and persistent restlessness in the North and a need for those living here to be deeply involved and committed to what is going on in their community."