Jane Buyers, natalka Husar &
Catharine MacTavish

Not A One Night Stand

March 6 - April 5, 2008

girls

Natalka Husar Seed Spitter , 2006-2008
oil on linen
85 x 55 inches
(beside)found early 20th C. Ukranian folk painting

Janice Kulyk-Keefer on Natalka Husar’s Seed Spitter:

Only an innocent could dress like this and still belong in a garden. And only in this globalized village of a planet where rain puddles wear the sheen of gasoline could such a garden grow, hemmed in by concrete and the idling engines of hyper-capitalism and compulsory consumerism. Seed-Spitter has survived the nursery of Chernobyl, and a childhood complicit with east-west voyeurism to enter an adolescence as compromised as any stage of life's way, given the way we all live now.

the poem:

Seed Spitter

Drowned summer, everything soaked, drenched, and yet unwashed.

Puddles gleam with gasoline; clouds batten

on air’s leaking ocean.

Who do you wait for by this clump

of hollyhocks, your screwdriver heels

caught in the cracks between cobblestones? Buttered

in puppy-fat, hooked on childhood pleasures—

sunflower seeds: shucking them, sucking-in

pith, spitting out salty husks. If there were soil, not stone

beneath your feet, husks might rot to nourish earth; if

it were tractor, not car parked down the road,

we might be thinking harvest, not hooker. Still, the pathos

of nakedness—chilled, pudgy legs, crammed

into high-arched fuck-me boots. Bare hands and face

above your jacket’s rumpled whites: smell

of soiled linen, sour milk.

Something stricken in these hollyhocks, as if,

lopped from a village garden,

they’d been tucked-up, rootless, in a concrete bed.

Girl with a face like rising dough,

hands clogged with rings, a splash of fair hair

bottled in a braid only a year ago.

Ghost of a child in a skirt that could