Natalie Majaba Waldburger

Canadian artist Natalie Majaba Waldburger creates sculptures and installations that explore the intersection of biology, nature, and human narratives. Through an open-disciplinary practice, her work emphasizes collaboration, anti-colonial research, institutional critique and interdisciplinary education, while addressing important themes of sustainability, social justice, and ecologically-respectful art practices.

 

Waldburger’s most recent work at the bio-art residency at the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA NYC) explores living material through an anthropomorphic lens.  Working with mycelium and mushrooms, she considers how the distribution of spores evokes the notion of “invasion” in its convergence with human narratives of movement, migration, colonization, cultural appropriation, and displacement. Waldburger mirrors the natural processes that occur beneath the surface of the forest floor with often unspoken impacts of human diasporic experiences on individuals and communities. Just as mycelium persists beneath the surface (or in our homes) and can spread unseen, cultural connections and longings from the diaspora might linger and affect people's lives in ways that are not immediately visible. Her work questions, challenges and reframes historical connotations of such terms as "invasion" and "colonization" by highlighting the shared nature of these processes in both the biological and human realms.

 

In recent years, anti-colonial research and institutional critique have become the focus for collaborative art practices as a co-founding member of The Drawing Board. As Associate Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD U, Waldburger teaches in the Life Studies specialization, which brings together the arts, sciences, and humanities to cultivate interdisciplinary studio art practices.  These pedagogical approaches speak to her own art research practice, positioned at the intersection of sustainability, social justice, and ecologically-respectful art practices.

 

Waldburger is also well-known for her figurative paintings that present the duplicated individual and explore notions of madness, gender ambiguity and identity. These themes reappear in her on-going text based series; where she buries clinical definitions from the Diagnostic Manual for Psychiatry under a multi-layered wax surface. She carefully and partially exposes the hidden diagnoses by surgically removing the upper layers and exposing the meaning from the depths of the wax. The selection of text that is exposed obscures the meaning of the clinical disorder and renders the original definitions unclear, illegible and incongruous.

 

Natalie Majaba Waldburger received her B.A. specializing in Women’s Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design receiving the Drawing and Painting Department Medal. This was followed by a post-graduate diploma in New Media Design at Sheridan College, a graduate residency at the Royal College of Art (London, UK), and an MFA from NSCAD University in Media Arts.

 

Waldburger is Associate Professor and Chair of Criticism and Curatorial Practice and Cross-Disciplinary Practices in the Faculty of Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). She developed and heads Life Studies, a specialization that brings together the arts, sciences, and humanities to cultivate interdisciplinary studio art practices. She has also taught at the Toronto School of Art and in the Department of Media Arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the Media Arts Department.

 

Waldburger is a founding member of The Drawing Board and the BLUNT Collective, and is included in Carte Blanche Volume 2: Painting and has been mentioned in such publications as The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, C Magazine, Canadian House and Home and Canadian Art Magazine. She has exhibited widely in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, including Berlin, Florence, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami.