ALTOONA, Pa. — “I Sang You A Song Though I Didn't Know the Words,” a body of work by Ivyside Juried Art Exhibition winner Boryana Rusenova-Ina, will be on display Oct. 12 through Dec. 9, in the Sheetz Gallery of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Rusenova-Ina, a native of Bulgaria, is currently an assistant professor of painting at Texas Tech University in Texas. Her work focuses on the relationship between place and belonging within the landscape genre. She earned an M.A. in art, design, and architecture education from the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and an M.F.A. in painting and drawing from The Ohio State University. Her work has been exhibited throughout Bulgaria and the United States. Rusenova-Ina has served as a visiting artist and completed residencies through the GOALS Project, an initiative which brought artists into Scottish classrooms. From 2011 to 2014, Rusenova-Ina served as the vice president of Roy G Biv Gallery for Emerging Artists in Ohio, and she was a founding member of the Couchfire Art Collective. Recently she completed a fully funded residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California.

Boryana Rusenova-Ina utilizes experiences of learning English in post-communist Bulgaria to influence this exhibition. “I find the intersection between language and identity, and how the former signifies the latter, to be a constant source of curiosity,” she says. Within her paintings, the artist is looking to preserve the state of flux that exists between writing and drawing by copying her own children’s scribbles. In this project, mimicry becomes a way to resist becoming fully set into an identity by highlighting the in-between nature of a child’s scribbles.

The Galleries are open Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For further information, call the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts at 814-949-5452.