Teresa Posyniak.

OCTOBER

Consensus: Blackfoot Portrait Series

A series of cultural portraits that provide a window into the Blackfoot world. To date, 22 portraits have been completed through a collaboration between Teresa Posyniak, a Calgary artist and Linda Many Guns, a Blackfoot elder.

Excerpt taken from Galleries West Article by Beverley Beckley

It is a body of work through which the artist speaks--quite figuratively. A connecting of self, artistic skills and the Western Canadian experience with the subject, the identity and culture of the Blackfoot Nation. This connectedness is the series of paintings and drawings called “Consensus” by Calgary artist Teresa Posyniak.

She has utilized the encaustic (wax) painting process for the past ten years and has work in many private and public collections, both national and international and has exhibited both her two and three-dimensional work across Canada. Her artwork captures the theme of resiliency as a positive force within the individual and realizes the beauty of the human body and its relationship to its environment.

Posyniak takes what she terms a ‘consensual’ approach to the making of these artworks. Teresa had been drawing the figures of women since the late eighties and the idea for “Consensus” arose after she met Linda Many Guns, a Blackfoot Elder from the Siksika Nation, currently working on her PhD. dissertation in Indigenous Studies at Trent University. The artist and Linda developed a friendship and in the context of a simple portrait sitting, discussions of how Linda wanted to be perceived, the role of her culture in these images, her relationship to the landscape and to the Blackfoot community and what being a Blackfoot woman meant to her became the framework for the larger series. Producing such work is a consensual and intimate act says Posyniak. The subject is a full participant in the work.