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Rebecca Burke

Rebecca Burke is a painter who works primarily in oil. Burke's paintings were recently featured in a solo exhibition organized by Mount Allison University's Owens Art Gallery.

From the exhibition catalogue, a passage written by Carol Williams expresses thoughts on Burke's use of symbols such as the hyena. She says, "Burke's environmental sensitivity is most keen in the paintings which illuminate the escalating tension between land, nature and animal life. Hyenas, tigers and elk are silhouetted against human-built structures and industrial intrusions. These paintings express a remorseful melancholy not only for the precipitous decline of biodiversity but for the absence of a heightened awareness about the effect of human presence on other life forms and creatures. Burke ponders the grim consequences of ignorance, self absorption and excessive consumption. But humans, and other life forms, perish. As Burke recently suggested, painting may inadequately declare complex problems of current humanity and is less competent to ignite the collective will to act. Simplicity also delivers a forceful message. Burke does not ignore the plaint of the living world that is voiceless."

Her work has been exhibited across Canada, in New York City, and internationally and she has received funding support from the Arts Branch of New Brunswick, the Canada Council, and the Marjorie Young Bell Fine Arts and Music Committee, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Rebecca Burke's paintings have been included in the 2007 Marion McCain - Atlantic art Exhibition which opened in October at Fredericton's, Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

In 1986, she was awarded major commission for a large scale kinetic sculpture for the Canada Pavilion at Expo '86 in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received a Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 1972 and is a Professor of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University, in Sackville New Brunswick, where she has taught painting, drawing and seminar courses in contemporary art issues since 1980.