Their tools were vivid imaginations and random objects from a grandmother’s home.
The end result was Baba’s House, a captivating art exhibition on display this month at the NorVA Centre.
It’s the work of local artist Katie Kozak and fellow artist Lucien Durey. In 2012-13, they spent a year living at the Creighton home of Kozak’s Baba, Sophie Ostrowski.
Anything and everything in Ostrowski’s home was viewed through an artistic lens, from butterscotch chips and family photos to toothpicks and old Nevada tickets.
Kozak and Durey arranged the items on a computer scanner to produce more than 300 inspired images – the sort of art that warrants a second, third and fourth look.
An accompanying book contains all of
the images along with the late Ostrowski’s amusing and informative reactions to them.
Of an image featuring a makeup compact surrounded by clothespins, Ostrowski remarked, “My clothespins and my makeup pack. Oh, that blue clothespin is still there? Then those long ones, they’re not worth the money that you pay for them.”
Another image features a photograph of flowers outside a home overlapping dozens of colourful plastic pegs from a Lite-Brite set. Her reaction: “Ohhhh! Okay, that’s my nice flowers along the wall…and where was this at? Was it at the trailer too? And I don’t know what all the nice coloured stuff is.”
The NorVA display consists of half of the images from the original Baba’s House show featured at Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery in 2014. The works were shown in other galleries and made their return to Creighton last year.
“Lucien and I have always intended to show the works here, since this is one location where many people knew my Baba and many people have commented on the ability to hear her voice when they read the quotes that go along with the images,” says Kozak.
One image that stands out for Kozak is titled March 19th (Chips), which placed an old photo of a home over top of a layer of butterscotch chips.
“When we showed it to Baba, she told us there was a pig under the window, there was and we had both missed this detail,” says Kozak, referring to a pig that had got loose from a nearby farm and appeared in the photo of the home.
Ostrowski’s thoughts on the same image: “That looks like chocolate chips. And in that brown house, there was a little old couple living in there, Mr. and Mrs. Williams. There was still snow on the ground and one day a pig ran away, and where didn’t it find some black dirt but under Mr. and Mrs. Williams’ window! That’s a pig laying there!”
Baba’s House will be at the NorVA Centre until June 1.
