Barbara Rehus is an Oakville-based painter and sculptor who has had solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada and the United States. She will create a bookwork based on the memory of her grandfather, a cruel and angry man who constantly claimed a fictitious Irish heritage, despite being of German background. The book will be tiny and physically hard to open, and will contain many copies of a childhood photo of her grandfather, emphasizing the mystery surrounding him and his motivations for pretending to be Irish. In sending the book on tour, Barbara hopes to make peace with a difficult segment of her family history by letting her grandfather ‘return’ to Ireland.

Young George
Barbara Rehus (2005)