By Natalka Husar and Janice Kulyk Keefer
This one-of-a-kind volume, which won best design award at the 2009 L’viv publishers’ forum, is a ‘siamese twin’: two books, artwork by Natalka Husar and poetry by Janice Kulyk Keefer, joined at the spine. An exploration of post-orange Ukraine, Burden of Innocence/Foreign Relations offers a bridge between Ukraine and North America and between the arts of painting and poetry, as well.
In form, function, production, Aptechka (Apothecary in Cyrillic) is a bridge connecting two separate books of painting and poetry, just as it connects contemporary Canada and Ukraine. The paintings suspend a tightrope between history and theater, the muse and conscience, condemnation of and compassion towards the subjects it treats. Conceived in Canada yet produced in Ukraine, Aptechka fuses disparate sensibilities and aesthetics to become a hybrid object, the result of long-distance electronic transmissions, 3 am phone calls across punitively different time zones and simple pencil drawings to clarify things words cannot express.. Aptechka required Husar to spend four weeks in Ukraine making final design decisions and overseeing printing and binding. Given that the trend in book design as in most everything else in Ukraine, is to ‘look forward, look western, look expensive,’ she had to convince the printers to let her rummage through warehouses for old materials and surplus stock, available in very limited quantities. Produced in an old bindery employing traditional methods of sewing and gluing–all hand labour–Aptechka is bound in four different materials, the remainders of order lists for Politburo folders, sewn in red and black thread to emphasize the distinctions between the book’s visual and verbal contents.