Dara Humniski

INTERVIEW:

Dara Humniski is a visual artist working primarily in drawing, but also printmaking, photography and sculpture. Using the natural world as a starting point, Humniski experiments with scale, media, and craft-processes to assemble fictional worlds with open-ended narratives that express things about the human condition. She completed a Bachelor of Design from the University of Alberta, is a Red Seal Journeyman carpenter and a founding member of the Loyal Loot design collective. Humniski has completed residencies at the Banff Centre, Plug-in ICA, and is based in Edmonton, Canada, located on Treaty 6 territory.

About the Works

Earlier this year I heard an artist (Laurie Anderson) say “a fake flower is just as good a real flower, because it reminds you of the real one” and I thought of how this could and couldn’t be true. I was thinking of flatness. Proxies, clones, archetypes, in two dimensions and three. If that was all we had left, made from memory or built from an algorithm, what could be enough? Flora always has a role in defining utopia. The pandemic delivered much anxiety, exposed underlying heath issues; it underlined a nature deficiency that comes with living in my apartment. I bought flowers when I could. We use flowers to say so much. To say it with flowers is to declare love, to show emotion, to share something of our inner life, to let them work on our behalf, to say goodbye, to show something is over, to underline the rules of a cycle, a wave. I was thinking of gifts of flowers, sprays, cartoons of flowers, windows, hand drawn renderings of monuments from architectural plans, etc. I tend to always depict the natural world, but I try to include repetition or some method of mechanical reproduction, like using and recycling stencils, transfer paper, stamps, etc.