Levytsky's "birdroom" project exhibited at Toronto gallery (10/21/01)

Levytsky's "birdroom" project exhibited at Toronto gallery

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - Award winning artist Ina Levytsky exhibited her "birdroom" project in the BUSgallery at the end of August in Toronto. Made up of large-sized prints - she uses dry point, making three prints in each edition - the project began as photos taken at the Royal Ontario Museum's Bird Gallery of people viewing stuffed birds through glass and steel encasements.

Ms. Levytsky, 28, explained: "While my previous body of work explored notions of human/animal sentience - the body, its movement, gestural language and sense of presence - the current body of work explores a kind of stilled life, one which draws on the setting of museum and gallery and which mixes artifice and art, taxidermy and portraiture, the living and the dead."

In 1998 Ms. Levytsky won the $7,000 Ernst and Young/Canadian Art Foundation award - the first prize at the Great Canadian Printmaking Competition - for one of her works in the series "Landscape: A Diary of Parts." That series was completed while she was a graduate student at the University of Calgary in the master of fine arts program.

She had spent a term of study at the Royal College of Art in London, U.K., and was inspired by visits to various Celtic sites in Great Britain to explore how ancient civilizations expressed their relationship to the animate earth.

A graduate in fine arts from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Ms. Levytsky works in graphic arts, mixed media and video. With the "birdroom" project, she also showed a series of photography-based works in mixed media that are glass-encased.

Ms. Levytsky has exhibited her work across Canada - in Toronto, Kingston, Calgary and Edmonton - and has taken part in exhibits in other countries, including Cuba, Japan, Slovenia and Chile. She lives in Toronto and is currently working on video set design.

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