Thelma Rosner

Thelma Rosner was born in Toronto in 1941 and is currently based in London, Ontario.

Rosner studied at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Education between 1959 and 1964. In 1972, she returned to school to study visual art at Western University, in London. Serendipitously, this was the same year that Paterson Ewen joined the faculty at Western. Already showing an interest in exploring issues of ornamentation, Rosner found Ewen to be supportive of the type of work she was making despite the fact that it did not follow art trends of the moment. After leaving Western in 1977, Rosner was faced with the challenge of balancing her studio practice with motherhood and domestic responsibilities.

In 1978, Rosner spent a year in Boulder, Colorado, where she encountered the collective, Front Range Women in the Arts, who helped her to strengthen her own personal and professional identities. During this same period, Rosner also had the good fortune to meet George Woodman, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who validated her interests by helping her to situate her work within the historical origins of pattern and decoration. Over the course of the 1980s, Rosner’s work shifted away from such decorative textual sources as the Book of Kells and Islamic illuminations to embrace other explorations of colour, texture, and structure through gestural, abstract painting.

Rosner’s practice during 1990s was characterized by large-scale paintings that combined abstraction with both high realism and the decorative, juxtaposing renderings of textiles, allusions to the familiarity of female domestic life, and imagery appropriated from the canon of male-dominated western art. Her 1995 exhibition, Collected Stories, presented multi-panel canvases that combined these images to create new, readable narratives of female experience.  In 1999, she expanded on these themes in her exhibition Still Life, which also heralded a shift beyond the two-dimensional canvas toward installation. Here, Rosner explored the social resonance of food as a part of domestic life, both broadly within our social and cultural fabric and specifically within Jewish culture. Rosner’s work, Still Life With Her Recipes for example, referred to the ability of food, as well as the ephemera generated by and surrounding food, to embody cultural memory.

More recently, Rosner has expanded her examination of the domestic to include a broader conception of home. The exhibition Homeland (2013) focused on the notion of home in relation to how the concept of native soil – “owned, shared, contested and beloved” – both underlies and undermines the feeling of belonging. This body of work explored the tensions between the Palestinian and Israeli communities – where conflict has been the defining feature of lived existence – by focusing on cultural similarities between the two communities, suggested through images of native flora, cuisine, desire for a stable homeland, and cultural behaviours such as hospitality.

She has exhibited widely across Ontario, at such galleries as Museum London, McIntosh Gallery (London), Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), Burlington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Peterborough, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), and McMaster University Art Gallery (Hamilton). Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, Museum London, London Board of Education, McIntosh Gallery Western University, John Labatt Ltd., and London Life Insurance. She is the recipient of grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.

Biography by Helen Gregory

SOURCES

Thelma Rosner: Still Life.  London Regional and Historical Museums, 1999. Exhibition catalogue.

Thelma Rosner: Collected Stories. Woodstock, Ontario: The Woodstock Art Gallery, 1995. Exhibition catalogue.

Thelma Rosner: Homeland. London, Ontario: Museum London; Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster Museum of Art, McMaster University, 2012. Exhibition catalogue.

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