Coppa Gallery and Jill Dyall Community Gallery
Station Gallery
Whitby, ON

This group exhibition celebrates the vitality and resilience of the Ukrainian cultural character in Canada. Here are eight artists who have travelled different routes, yet share the same root. This root is Ukraine. Their ancestors built a free national spirit. A war not seen in over eighty years is once again attempting to extinguish that life-force. With their all-out assault, Russians are deliberately killing civilians and targeting or plundering Ukraine’s rich cultural heritage.

It is time to re-evaluate and survey the contributions of Canadian artists of Ukrainian descent. This experience has been formed and shaped by successive waves of immigration to Canada. Here is the acquisition of that experience. Drawing on more than one cultural repertoire, all eight artist in this exhibition engage in a cross-cultural dialogue filled with delicacy, grace and astonishing beauty. This exhibition is many things: it is a site of dialogue, a prompt to remember or perhaps to cry. Most of all this is a prayer for Ukraine’s swift triumph and recovery in peace.