When Canadian-Israeli artist Lezli Rubin-Kunda returned to Canada from her adoptive home near Tel Aviv for a cross-country pilgrimage, her quest was both personal and professional. Her goal: to discover if a yearning to feel grounded in a specific place was unique to her. If not, how did other artists use their practices to explore a sense of home?
Rubin-Kunda, who teaches art at Technion University in Haifa, describes her own multidisciplinary practice as a constant search for “deep inhabiting,” which she traces to her personal and cultural history within the twin poles of belonging and dispossession. Raised in Toronto, her move to Israel as a young woman deepened her felt understanding of the complexities of ‘home’ in environments fraught with conflicts related to land and cultural survival.
In At Home: Talks with Canadian Artists About Place and Practice, she presents the views of 31 artists from Vancouver Island to Halifax based on conversations that took place in 2012 and 2013. Although the artists take distinct approaches to their work, they are situated within a web of themes Rubin-Kunda artfully teased out of her research.
Lezli Rubin-Kunda
For instance, Saskatoon artist Amalie Atkins uses the prairie landscape as a stage for video installation and performance-based works subtly influenced by her Mennonite upbringing. Tanya Harnett, a member of the Carry the Kettle First Nation in Saskatchewan, expresses an Indigenous view of home as a fierce and undeniable rootedness to one’s tribal land, where body and site are irrevocably linked.
Sometimes Rubin-Kunda switches the dynamic, as in her talk with Toronto sculptor and photographer Stan Krzyzanowski. Influenced by Zen and seeking to avoid nostalgia, he insists home is exactly where he is situated, “here, now.”
Whatever the theme, Rubin-Kunda is interested in the inherent dilemmas in connecting to the land – how the present exists in uncomfortable relationship with the past, for example, or how belonging can be a challenging emotional terrain.
Refreshingly free of theoretical discourse, At Home offers compelling insights within a nuanced self-reflective stance. ■
At Home: Talks with Canadian Artists About Place and Practice by Lezli Rubin-Kunda: Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, N.B., 2018.
