January 11, 2008
In early 2008, this back page of On Campus News will be used to feature work found in the University of Saskatchewan art collection. Begun in 1911, the collection comprises more than 4,400 objects, including many important examples from various artists and eras. OCN asked Kent Archer, director of the collection, to select and discuss the works in this series.
Leesa Streifler is interested in how the human mind and body process intense emotional experiences, traumas like a death, illness or loss of power being an ongoing theme. She explores all kinds of polarities – black and white photographs and the painted image, interior and exterior, surface and depth – and it is at these junctions that the viewer finds many unusual twists and turns in her work.
It is exactly those disjunctures that draw Kent Archer to Streifler’s work; in Contemporary Mythology: Sorrow, it is the colour on the black and white, the drawing on the photo. Archer’s interest in this piece is so intense, he chose this work to hang in his own office in the College Building.
“It’s an image I’ve always been interested in. I’m interested in the ambiguity of the image, the overlay and complexity, and it evokes an equally complex response in me. It’s a piece that is contradictory within itself but I think that’s a compelling attribute that plans an essential role in the make-up of this intriguing image.”
Archer worked with Streifler to acquire the painting, part of a group of works she donated in 1995. The artist, originally from Winnipeg, earned a BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1980 and her MFA from Hunter College, New York in 1983. Since 1986, Streifler has taught visual art at the University of Regina.
Artist: Leesa Streifler
Title: Contemporary Mythology: Sorrow
Date: 1990
Medium: mixed media on plexiglass & paper
Dimensions: 153.5 cm x 108.5 cm
Gift of the artist, 1995
University Art Collection image
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