Winnipeg Free Press, November 15, 2005

HO, by Toni Hafkenscheid

Platform Gallery, 121-100 Arthur St.

To December 3

HO, by Toni Hafkenscheid

Platform Gallery, 121-100 Arthur St.

To December 3

One of the more unique and challenging art works to come out of Europe in the early 20^th century was Rene Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images.

Under an image of what is quite clearly a pipe, Magritte wrote: Ceci n'est pas une pipe—literally, "this is not a pipe."

And he was right, of course, because it wasn't a pipe—it was only a painting of one, and it was that subtle but important difference that he was drawing the viewer's attention towards. Magritte's painting showed that an image is not the real thing, but only an artist's reproduction of something—and images, as he reminded us, can be treacherous.

Toronto artist Toni Hafkenscheid, a Dutch-born professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design, seems to use Magritte's ideas as a point to consider the North American landscape, and how we have viewed it both now and in the past.

HO, the show's title, are the letters used to describe a particular scale of model train set, and the work itself looks like some kind of model, where it's impossible to tell what, if anything, is real.

To describe it simply, Hafkenscheid's exhibit presents a series of photographs that, at first glance, look like pictures of model train set worlds. Everything about the trains, mountains, beach scenes, cityscapes and people in these works, including the colours, seem almost too real, if that's possible. And the slightly blurred perspective, with only the centre of the work in sharp focus, gives the viewer a sense of looking though a peephole at some tiny, miniature world.

By using a lens designed for architectural photography—ideal for taking full views of tall buildings, often from directly across the street—Hafkenscheid is able to fit a wide depth of field into his images. This means that everything from the immediate foreground to the furthest mountaintop have the same, blurry focus.

For those walking into this show knowing nothing about it, the mysterious quality of the photos is both puzzling and fascinating. The illusion that these are in fact models is so convincing, that it's easy to spend the entire viewing time trying to guess what's real in the photo and what's not.

Photographing iconic North American landscapes—rugged mountains, small roadside motels, even Niagara Falls—the artist presents them in a way that viewers would only have seen them in postcards. The fact that the works look this way isn't accidental—during the developing stage, the artist tints the images to give them that 1950's postcard-perfect hue, calling attention again to the artifice of images, and how they can be used to misrepresent.

It's no coincidence that the train, one of the ultimate symbols of "progress" on our continent, would show up so often. Hafkenscheid's work is often talked about in terms of the notions of progress, or the dream of the brilliant future that existed in 1950's North America. It's also no coincidence that, in the image of Niagara Falls, the tourists are too preoccupied with themselves or each other to bother looking at the falls, since the idyllic dreams for the future that existed in the 1950's largely ignored the natural landscape and our effects on it, something we're paying the price for today.

Since the idea behind postcards is that they be an advertising tool, designed to lure future tourists or to persuade old ones to return, it stands to reason that they would present an overly optimistic view. Hafkenscheid does the same here, seeming to deliberately ignore the political or social implications of the images, and thereby giving them an even more powerful and ironic political twist.

By taking the real and placing it in such an unsettling, miniaturized context, Hafkenscheid reminds that viewer, as Rene Magritte did 80 years ago, that images can't be trusted. Even in the realest of depictions, he shows us, there is always a distortion or bias.

As with the idyllic images of 1950's North America, the artist presents an impossibly perfect world, leaving that which is real and that which is not in doubt. It's a show that, both for the theory behind it, and for the incredible visual quality of the work itself, reveals an artist at the top of his game.

Winnipeg Free Press, January 10, 2006

(Image: Isiah 42:18, from the Aliyah Suite, by Salvador Dali)

Aliyah Suite, by Salvador Dali

The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.

To March 19

In 1967, a year before the state of Israel prepared to celebrate its 20 ^th anniversary, noted Spanish artist Salvador Dali was commissioned to create a series of lithograph prints celebrating this historic event.

Dali may have seemed an odd choice at first, famous as he was for his bizarre, anti-art approach that saw him arrive at one of his shows in a limousine full of cauliflower, and paint such images as melting clocks and flaming giraffes.

Yet, in the decades that followed his rise to prominence with the Dada movement, Dali's work frequently explored religious, literary and historical themes.

The creation of the modern state of Israel, which he depicts in this show, was the result of a post-Holocaust movement of Jews from around the world, back to the Middle East. It also displaced large numbers of the existing Arab population, often against their will, as the Jewish population in the region grew from 8 per cent in 1900 to 75 per cent today.

Conflicts that flared up during the re-settlement have continued, and while there have been recent signs of hope, such as the pullout of Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in September, 2005, the mood in modern Israel is one of uneasy co-existence at best, and ethnic and religious violence at worst.

Dali's exhibit openly celebrates the creation of the state of Israel, a theme that was put forward a decade and a half before him by the Jewish-Canadian writer A.M. Klein. In his remarkable novel The Second Scroll , Klein compares the modern re-settlement of Israel with the biblical Exodus story, in which the early Jewish people, under divine protection, escape the bondage of Pharaoh and return to the Promised Land.

As Klein did, then, Dali gained inspiration for Aliyah Suite from biblical and historical sources, depicting the return to Israel as divinely led. Many of the work's titles come directly from Hebrew scripture, and the word "Aliyah" translates as "ascention to Zion," which is the biblical name for the modern capital of Jerusalem.

It's the potential for controversy, then, at least in part, that makes this show so interesting—Dali's unapologetic celebration of the foundation of Israel. Whether he actually believed this himself, though, is not clear, since it's been suggested that he was in fact an anti-Semite.

Critics and historians have noted that in some works (such as the one depicting Rachael weeping for her murdered children, an allusion to both a biblical story and the modern Holocaust) Dali seems to almost overplay the emotion, as if he only half-sympathized. Others, however, argue that his work was truly sympathetic, and consistent with historical traditions.

Nevertheless, the work itself, from a limited edition series of lithograph prints, is fascinating—this is, after all, one of the 20^th century's most revered artists.

Using watercolours and inks, Dali created a semi-abstract depiction of various scenes from the recent history of Israel.

Psalm 23:4, ("Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death") , shows huddled crowds of refugees, pressing towards Zion beneath a sinister cloud. As A.M. Klein did before him, Dali views the smoke from the concentration camp furnaces as a new "pillar of fire", which in the biblical story, led the Jews through the desert.

It's a powerful metaphor, suggesting that the victims of the Holocaust served as spiritual "guides" on the modern return to Israel.

Another work depicts the massive construction projects that helped Israel to modernize. An irrigation pipe is shown being installed, while an angel hovers overhead protectively. The work's title is, The Land at the Start of Jewish Settlement: "I will make the wilderness a pool of water," (Isiah 41: 18) , suggesting that the modernization of Israel fulfilled ancient prophesies.

In The Second Scroll, A.M. Klein concludes repeatedly that the only way for the new Israel to achieve divine sanction was to create a nation in which the three "Great Faiths"—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—could live and worship together, free of hatred and warfare.

And judged by that standard, it's been a failure so far.

But with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on his deathbed, and the peace process in doubt, Klein's standard seems particularly worth considering, and perhaps now more than ever.

Winnipeg Free Press, January 11, 2007

(Image: Peter Rindisbacher, after Interior of a Sioux Lodge, 1824. Aquatint and etching, hand-coloured. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.

Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana: Vast New Lands--Canada's Northwest, by various artists
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.
To Jan. 21

Amidst Greeks myths and old English trade laws, the grand narrative of history can seem a little dull--something for dusty old professors more than us everyday, working folk. So it's easy to forget that at its core, history is made up of countless individual stories, each of them involving a living, breathing person.
The fur traders who paddled up and down the rivers of the early Canadian west, for example, and the native people they encountered, were obviously from a different historical and cultural context than us. And yet they weren't really all that much different in the desires, struggles, and contradictions that made up their daily lives.
An exhibit currently on display at the WAG shows the familiar historical archetypes that we all know, as well as the real, living people behind those masks. The sixty or so paintings and prints are entirely from the collection of the late Peter Winkworth, a financier who collected more than 4,000 pieces of historical art during his lifetime and then left them all to the government of Canada.
The exhibit presents what seems to be a fairly straightforward visual history of the Canadian north and west between about 1800 and 1890, and yet it's packed with stories that go beyond the names we may think we know.
There's John Franklin, for example, the captain of an expedition that vanished in the Canadian arctic in 1849, and which thereby captured the popular imagination of Europe for years afterward.
Sir George Back was the official artist for some of Franklin's earlier (and more fortunate) expeditions, and there are several works here by him, all done while he traveled through the vast parcel of land that stretched from present-day Thunder Bay to the Pacific Ocean and the North Pole.
Before he teamed up with the legendary Franklin, though, Back had adventures of his own, including joining the British navy at age 12, and spending six years in a prison camp in France after being captured at sea.
And yet beyond the one-dimensional image we may hold of someone like Back, that of the romantic explorer and artist, was a man who historians describe as an unrepentant womanizer, drinker, and carouser. His co-workers seem to have considered him difficult and untrustworthy, while his journals were described by a contemporary as "all ornament and conceit, (with) no substance, and no small portion of sentimentality and self-admiration."
Despite those apparent inconsistencies, however, the half dozen woks here by Back offer a rare and elegant glimpse at a world that has changed forever.
As for Louis Riel, his leadership in two rebellions, and his subsequent execution, have made him as celebrated and controversial figure as any in the Canadian West.
But as works from his own era show, Riel's place in the popular mind may have changed greatly over time. One work, for example, a political cartoon from a Toronto newspaper in 1885, shows General Middleton, leader of the government troops who defeated Riel at Battoche. In the work, Middleton is seen telling prime minister John A. Macdonald: "Here is your prisoner. I have done my duty, now you do yours."
Behind the two men, and the shackled figure of Riel, a noose dangles suggestively.
One of the most intriguing characters in this exhibit, though, may be Peter Rindisbacher. A farmer and artist who immigrated here in 1821 with his Swiss parents, Rindisbacher is considered the first full-time resident artist among the settlers of the Canadian west.
For several years, Rindisbacher painted scenes from daily life, including the native populations of this part of the prairies, before moving with his family to St. Paul, Minnesota. Prints of his works were circulated widely in Europe and the U.S., providing some of the earliest images of the Canadian west to the larger world.
In 1834, only 28 years old, Rindisbacher died from a tuberculosis epidemic that swept the young American city of St. Paul. Beyond those few bare facts, little is known about this important and rather tragic figure.
These images, then, and the characters behind them, form a distinct, lively part of our history as Manitobans--and there's nothing really dull or dusty about that.

Winnipeg Free Press, February 10, 2007

(Image: The Swing, by Jean-Honore Fragonard)

This article appeared in the Wpg Free Press, as part of their Valentine's Day "Love and Sex" section.

For a revealing look at sex in art, a good place to start is in 1776, when Jean-Honore Fragonard's painting The Swing was titillating European audiences. The work shows a young man discreetly looking up a young woman's skirt, to her apparent enjoyment, as she's pushed on a swing by her older lover. By today's standards, it's pretty tame stuff, but for Fragonard's day, this frank depiction of desire was nothing short of scandalous.
In the age of internet porn, with upskirt this and girls gone that, it can seem as if we're living in a time that is particularly obsessed with sex. But even in the most repressed of cultures--Victorian England comes to mind--sexual tension still bubbled hotly under the surface, and popped up in some of the unlikeliest places.
Well into the 1800's, church control over the codes of public morality in Europe was strict. This showed up in the art, which was almost entirely religious-themed. But even there, in what would seem at first to be the most orthodox of artwork, it doesn't take much imagination to notice the sex peeking through.
Italian sculptor Giovani Bernini, for example, created famous 17th century works depicting Saint Theresa, including a scene in which the saint, after days of fasting and prayer, was said to be suddenly overcome by the power of Christ. Many scholars point out Bernini's own religious devotion, so that he likely intended the work to be nothing more than a straightforward religious icon.
It still seems that, consciously or not, Bernini has depicted the saint as experiencing something other than just religous fervour, since this and other similar works show her hands clutching feverishly at her breasts, or sliding down between her legs, while her eyes roll heavenward.
Religious icon, or sex symbol--or perhaps a bit of both.
The question of what is pornography and what is art, has for centuries been a horny, er, thorny issue. Two leading Italian artists were imprisoned in the early 1500's by Pope Clement II, after the publication their book I Modi (The Ways), which depicted various sexual escapades through images and text.
Even then, though, there was clearly a market for this type of work, since most art was bought or commissioned by wealthy patrons, and with a book like I Modi, numerous editions were usually produced at great expense. In I Modi's case, all copies were destroyed by the Pope, and only a less-than-faithful reproduction still remains to show us the work that enraged and titillated 16th century audiences.
At the same time that European artists were sneaking erotica into religious art, Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated Kama Sutra texts celebrated sexuality with explicit scenes of orgies.
The connections between art and sex go back much further, though. Some of the earliest known works of art depict female nudes, and are thought to have been representations of fertility goddesses. The so-called Venus of Willendorf for example, found in 1908 in Austria, is a 24,000 year old statue of a nude, pregnant female.
And both the ancient Greeks and Romans showed an obsession with sex that makes our modern internet porn culture seem dull in comparison. Phallic symbols and nudes show up in almost every work imaginable, from scenes of daily life to mythological images.
To these ancients, no sexual subject was taboo. Their dramas and comedies openly discussed and parodied topics that even most of today's Hollywood films (and some of the raunchiest internet porn) wouldn't touch with a ten-foot dildo. And Sappho's erotic lesbian poetry remains every bit as spicy today as when it was written in the 7th century BC.
In the last few centuries, standards in Europe and North America have changed enough that sex in art is fairly accepted, and no longer has to be subtle.
The fifth annual Seattle Erotic Art Festival takes place next month, for example, with thousands of artists and visitors from across North America expected to participate. And internationally recognized figures like Robert Mapplethorpe and Julian Murphy continue to make images that blur the boundaries between high art and erotica.
Looking at a history of art, it seems that from our earliest ancestors on, humans have been fascinated with sex--that would probably explain why there's always been so many new little humans running around.

Winnipeg Free Press, February 8, 2007

(Images: Healthy, and Oiseau (froid), by Denis Prieur. Photos by Lorne Roberts)

Oiseau (glum), by Denis Prieur
La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, 219 Provencher Blvd.
To March 13

When looking at or describing a piece of art, it's easy to throw out adjectives like "fresh", "exciting", "unique", and so on. They're generally quite safe, and can be rather meaningless if you want them to be.
Looking at work by local artist Denis Prieur (he calls them sculptural drawings), any number of those adjective can easily spring to mind. But as always, there's something about cliches that don't quite tell the whole story.
With Prieur, it's almost automatic to call the work "fun", or "child-like" because it certainly is that. It's partly the materials, as his art incorporates yarn and sparkles, and uses plywood, glue, and felt markers as some of its main components.
It feels a bit like looking at work by some weirdly mature little kid, who has managed, by gluing and colouring long enough, to actually come up with some genuinely interesting art.
Of course, Prieur is no-preschooler. He's actually a thirty-something U of M grad, and one of a large crew of mainly francophone artists of all stripe who have come out of St. Boniface in the last decade or so.
Prieur has said in the past that his artmaking was inspired by a time spent living in Asia, in which he found the local scripts to be very beautiful, even though he didn't understand their meaning.
With that idea in mind, his own work often incorporates text that is carefully (one might say obsessively) hidden inside the images. That means that his works are often like heiroglyphics, or puzzles, with something other than the obvious going on.
Influenced by such artists as the American sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who is perhaps best know for a giant three-dimensional hamburger, Prieur creates an unusual hybrid of crude carpentry and Pop Art that still manages to be serious work.
He uses sheets of plywood that are cut into smaller bits, coloured with felts and paint, and then glued on top of each other--sometimes up to six or seven layers deep.
Featuring light, airy themes and imagery such as birds, bits of old advertisements, and travel scenes, there's a collage-style feel to all of his works. It's as if he had cut and pasted bits from a National Geographic magazine, or scribbled pages full of drawings, and then turned them all to wood.
That fun, lively style is part of what makes Prieur's work so visually interesting. It also compensates for the fact that, beyond the recurring theme of birds, the show doesn't have much of an overall idea or theme to unify the work.
Canadiana shows up regularly, though, providing both animal and human scenes. In a work like Migration, a mountain range hitches a ride on the back of a flatbed semi, while Canadian geese fly by overhead. In Lucca (she), we see what looks to be a travel photo, as bits of wood become a Rocky Mountain postcard scene, a woman posed in front of it.
In some works, the breezy humour shows through in the titles alone, which mix English, French and Italian, and which often add to the mystery. In other works, such as his straightforward and lifelike depcitions of birds, the strength of the image alone is enough.
Prieur's only other solo show thus far has been a modest exhibit at a local college. This new exhibit places him among our city's top young artists, and makes him one of a select few who can claim to be doing work that is entirely their own.

Winnipeg Free Press, March 7, 2007

(Image: Hang Around the Fort One Day, by Linus Woods)

Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, by Linus Woods
Urban Shaman, 290 McDermot Ave.
To Mar. 5

A unique and powerful myths of the aboriginal people of the central and western prairies is mentioned by American cultural historian Joseph Campbell in his book The Power of Myth, published just after his death in 1988.
Originating in the Blackfoot tribe of present-day Alberta and Montana, it tells the story of a chief's heroic daughter. One year, when the buffalo refused to be herded off the cliffs as they had every year, it seemed as though her people would starve. So the chief's daughter agreed to marry the leader of the buffalo herd, if only he would agree to get his friends and family to jump off the cliff again and provide meat for her people.
Linus Woods, a Dakota-Ojibway artist from the Long Plains First Nation, near Brandon, has chosen this powerful mythological symbol as the title of his show, on at Urban Shaman until this Saturday.
In the story, the bison agreed to the deal, and so the princess left her tribe to roam the plains with him. Her father the chief, though, chased after her, heartbroken, only to be trampled by the buffalo herd. The princess covered her father's body in a blanket, then performed a dance that slowly brought him back to life.
The leader of the buffalo herd is so impressed that he allows the princess to return to her people, and tells her something along the lines of: "From now on, dance this dance every year before the hunt, and us buffalo will always come to your people and jump off the cliff, because your dance will bring us back to life."
So from then on, the story goes, the Blackfoot people danced this ceremonial dance every year before the hunt, and the buffalo allowed themselves to be run off the cliff.
In the past, Woods has said that his work, a blending of ancient native traditions and avant-garde painting, seeks to reproduce the effect of these oral myths. Rather than having a single purpose or conclusion, he feels that his work can be open-ended, and subject to interpretation. (For example, in the myth of the princess and the buffalo, the point of the story wasn't just to remind the people to honour and respect the source of their food, but it also reflected social codes of marriage, family and tribal life, and so on).
Woods's latest show presents a dozen trippy blue-green landscapes and figures, and in style, if not in content, seems to borrow from artists like David Hockney and Picasso as much as any specific "aboriginal" style.
The trickster figure of the rabbit, though, a recurring character in the mythology of plains people, shows up in most of Woods's paintings here. Like the trees, humans, and and even the landscape around him, the rabbit almost always leans to the east, as if pushed by some invisible force.
It's a skillful blend of medium and message, in which the theme and colour work together to create the moody shamanistic effect the artist has in mind.
Those who've seen Woods's work before, in the handful of major shows he's been in, will recognize ongoing changes and development in his style.
The exhibit shows that, just shy of 40, Woods is hitting his stride as an artist, and perhaps even beginning to emerge as a truly distinctive voice. So while this exhibit shows his impressive development over the last few years, the best may be yet to come.

Winnipeg Free Press, May 24, 2007

Image by Don Gill, from www.erraticwinnipeg.blogspot.com

Erratic Space, by Don Gill
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd. (and www.erraticwinnipeg.blogspot.com/)
To July 1

Everyone's familiar with the private eye from 1950's film noir. You know the character: the tough-as-nails detective, gruff and lonely, but endearing. He smokes and drinks a bit too much, knows his way around the seedy back alleys and bars of the city, knows who to pay off to get whatever information he needs to solve the case.
Don Gill, a Lethbridge-based artist, may or may not work in this style, although he certainly challenges most people's notions of what makes an artist.
About to wrap up his month-long residency in the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Gill has turned the gallery into his own private eye's office, and turned the city itself into a case to be solved.
Starting on May 1, and for two more months, Gill will take his camera, a notebook, a GPS device, and just walk the streets of Winnipeg every day, rain or shine, trying to solve the mystery of what makes our city what it is.
Now, understand this about Gill's work--there's no real art show, per se.
I mean, there's a web log you can see, and the gallery itself contains a few images from similar projects he's done in other cities, some travel scrapbooks, and his studio, open for all to visit.
I would suggest starting with the blog. It contains one journal entry per day, with details about the length of his walk (sometimes more than 20 kilometres), the weather, notes about random adventures or people he met, and a single photo.
The blog provides that first inkling of how fascinating our city becomes when seen through the eyes of an outsider--simple, ordinary things take on a tinge of the exotic or, at the very least, of the new.
In the gallery itself, there's a wall that looks like a scrapbook in progress. It includes newspaper articles, dated from his stay here, as well as photos from his daily walks. It's certainly the most physical part of this somewhat elusive art project.
For example, there's an image from Louis Riel's grave, a spot that marked the symbolic beginning of Gill's project. There are pictures of dogs, ducks, art, and of the wild turkey who seems to have taken up residence downtown.
There are pictures of random scraps of food and garbage, of billboards and sidewalks, of discarded toys and the riverbank--scenes from everyday Winnipeg.
There's even a drawing of Gill, done on May 8 by some kid named Sebastian.
So Gill's work is all about archiving and cataloguing, about documenting what seems at first to be the ordinary and everyday. Of course, that's what a good detective has to do, right?--find the hidden clues that give away the whole mystery?
The whole show becomes a bit like detective work, then, both on the artist's part and on ours. He explores our city, and we're expected to explore his blog, his studio, to sift through the clues in newspaper articles and photos tacked to the wall.
(And a real detective, of course, would know to even sift through his garbage can, since it's just sitting out there in the open, and practically begging to be sifted through. But I'm sorry to report there wasn't much exciting--just a few granola bar wrappers, and the packaging from some parcels.)
It's fair to say that Gill likes our city. He loves it even, and from the evidence we have to go on, he seems to see the beauty in it more than many of us.
But as for where the "art" is in this show, Gill simply leaves it out there, an unsolved case in progress.
So it's really up to you here to be the detective--up to me, up to the viewers, and to anyone who lives in or visits Winnipeg.
There are still two days left to see the artist in the studio, and while his WAG residency ends this Sunday, the project continues until July 1.
In the meantime, check it out online at www.erraticwinnipeg.blogspot.com/

Winnipeg Free Press, June 28, 2007

Image: George Reid, The Story, 1890; Oil on canvas Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery; Gift from the Hugh F. Osler Estate

Into the Collection: Highlights of Historical Painting, by various artists
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.
ongoing/rotating exhibits to March, 2008

So maybe it's because I'm listening to sad music and it's raining while I write this. Or, maybe it's because someone I've always admired at a distance, through some of my closest friends, passed away this week at 27 years old, after a long struggle with lukemia.
But whatever the reasons, this week I'm wondering about whether art really has any meaning at all.
It's a rhetorical question, of course, because if art had no meaning, we humans wouldn't have been making it since the beginning of time.
No--we make art, and think about it, and hang it on walls, because it moves us somehow. It teaches us something, makes us feel like things will be okay, or like things are every bit as awful (and beautiful) as they really seem to be.
So all of these thoughts were with me in different ways when I biked over to the Winnipeg Art Gallery this week, to look at a show of works from their vast historical collection.
The oldest paintings, European works from six hundred years ago, are almost entirely paintings from Christian history--works showing Jesus and the saints.
Behind that, though, as the keen observer will realize, artists of every age manage to convey pathos, anger, debauchery, sexiness, and doubt into works that, on the outside at least, were only about religion.
In works by 15th century Dutch artist Cranach the Elder, or an unknown German artist's painting The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, tiny details hint at larger narratives. The positioning of a hand, the direction of the eye, or a recognized art symbol like a flower, or a peach, helps tell a story that's about more than just Jesus and the saints.
Move forward four hundred years in time, to when the Impressionists cast a long shadow over art.
Almost every work from this era bears their stamp to some degree, from Dorothea Sharpe's 1902 work In the Orchard, celebrating the nobility of daily labour, or Bernard de Hoog's charming, romantic scene The Proposal.
Again, as with the earlier religious paintings, these artists work within what at first seem to be narrow borders, but still manage to depict the whole range of human emotions.
Shortly after this time, in the 1920's, a Winnipeg artist named L.L. Fitzgerald spent some time in New York City, and was influenced by the Post-Impressionist art of the day.
Back home in Winnipeg, shortly before joining the legendary Group of Seven, Fitzgerald created Potato Patch, Snowflake, a painted scene from his grandparents' farm in southwestern Manitoba.
Like others, Fitzgerald shows the nobility of daily work, but with a whole scheme of colours, ideas and designs that artists before his time would never have thought of.
He, too, though, was just a product of his time--better than many artists, but still influenced by trends, ideas, and demands of his day.
And just like artists since the beginning of time, he was using the art forms of his day to work through these same ideas that we've all wrestled with.
For Fitzgerald, it meant that he stopped painting these types of landscapes not long after this work was created. Instead, he embarked on a two-decade experiment with abstract art, trying to find the divine through nature and paint, trying to answer these same questions.
He once said: "The idea is not to simply reproduce things (in paintings), but to start with their centre, their spiritual core, and to build the image outward from there."
My friend's death this week, of course, has something to do with all of these musings about centuries of art, and why they might matter. But you might see this show completely differently, depending on where you're at right now.
So maybe that's why art always has and always will matter to us--it speaks to us across time and differences, tells the same basic stories, asks the same basic questions.
Good art (and bad art, too) provides us with some kind of record, something that says we were here once, and we lived and understood some things about the workings of the world. And for reasons that we still don't really get, all of that seems to matter a great deal.

Winnipeg Free Press, July 2, 2007

Image: Warbler Part 7-- Favourite Records, by the Royal Art Lodge

Where is Here?, by the Royal Art Lodge
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.
To Sept. 2


It's like a scene from some Dr. Seuss book, or the fever dream of a weirdly mature little kid:
A young boy leans against a tree, in mid-conversation with a giant, dark snowman, whose tusk-like nose makes him as happily creepy as any Royal Art Lodge scene.
Their dialogue unfolds thusly:
Snowman: Where did I come from?
Boy: You came from the dark snow that I used to form you.
Snowman: What will be become of me?
Boy: You will melt away in the warmth and return to where you came from.
Snowman: Were there others like me?
Boy: There were two others.

This strange conversation, provided without explanation or context in a small painting, is one of more than a hundred new works by the Royal Art Lodge, on now at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Currently made up of three locals--Neil Farber, Michael Dumotier, and Marcel Dzama, who now lives in New York City--the Royal Art Lodge has its roots in the mid-1990's, in the fine arts faculty at the University of Manitoba. In their current form, and with other lineups, they've shown in leading galleries from Los Angeles to New York, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and South Korea.
Almost as intriguing as the work itself is the way it's created. When they can, the Royal Art Lodge make new work in their Wednesday night get-togethers, gatherings of old friends who crank up the tunes, and then crank out some art.
Each work is collaborative, with one artist beginning it, another adding some touches, and the third finishing it off. Only when all three agree that it's done is the work given a library-card date stamp of approval. (In the past, finished work that didn't make the grade has been cheerfully destroyed. A recent exhibit in a swank New York gallery saw Dzama, wearing a giant bear suit, feeding rejected work into a combination platypus/paper shredder.)
Their influence on the hip, young art world is significant, both here and abroad, and it's safe to say that, worldwide, there's now a whole generation of Royal Art Lodge imitators.
So the exhibit's title asks the question: Where is Here?. It's a question about where this art comes, from both geographically and philosophically--where is capital-H "here", after all, in the age of the Internet, reality TV and jet travel, when the centre of our culture is everywhere and nowhere at once?
And where is the "here" of the art itself? What meaning can we find in a creepy snowman talking to his creator, learning about his ultimate fate, and about those who came before him?
What about some of the other works?
In the Girls and Women series, a group of 50 three by three centimetre paintings, one work shows a fluffy yellow chick, freshly hatched, and sitting innocently beneath a caption that reads: Mechanically separated from his parents.
Or witness the 1950's housewife in Marie, complete with cocktail dress and high heels, climbing a riverbank to shoot turtles with a handgun.
Always floating somewhere between humour and polite horror, between wisdom and wit, between child-like simplicity and highly refined skill, the Royal Art Lodge invite us on a journey to wherever "here" is, with their collection of strange, shape-shifting characters.
Take one of the works in Warbler, in which a curious menagerie of a pig, a weasel, a snake, a mouse, a turtle, and a bird, sit listening to a record player. The text explains that they're listening to the bird's favourite record--Candles in the Rain, by Melanie.
Like so much of their work, it's silly and absurd, and while parallels could be seen to literary works like Charlotte's Web, or Animal Farm, we're given almost nothing in the way of context, other than the rest of their art.
So who are these friendly animals, and what compels them to gather around a record player, taking turns listening to each other's favourite albums?
Everything about it, like so much of the exhibit, brings to mind the Royal Art Lodge themselves--a strange, unlikely grouping of animals, coming together to listen to each other's music and, in doing so, creating something entirely new.

Winnipeg Free Press, August 2, 2007

William Kurelek, Despondency, 1963. Oil on masonite. Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery. Gift of an anonymous donor. (Photo by Ernest Mayer).


Around Here: Scenes from the Manitoba Historical Collection, by various artists
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.
To Nov. 10

i.d., eh?, by Charlie Johnston
Millenium Library, 251 Donald St.
To Aug. 30

Like many young Canadians, I've seldom thought much about myself as having come from anywhere in particular, or having much to speak of in the way of roots.
I mean, as far as I knew, the world began in Transcona, sometime in the early 70's.
This past weekend, though, along with most of my family and (a hundred other people), I made the trek out to Shortdale, a ghost town in the Riding Mountain area.
The reason for our trip was simple, but exciting--the unveiling of a memorial, and the re-dedication of a graveyard, just up the road from where my grandmother was born, and where twenty Polish families settled and farmed in the early 1900's.
Until recently, when a team of volunteers cleaned it up, the graveyard was forgotten, and completely grown over, but it was the place where some of my ancestors were buried--people with names like Geryluk and Gunchoski, who farmed the land and attended the local Catholic church.
Like most of my family, this was the first time I was able to see this place where my history in this country began, and needless to say, it was a powerful experience.
Two exhibits on now seem to consider some of these same ideas, though in very different ways.
At the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a show of historical paintings from Manitoba cover a period from the 1850's up to the 1990's. It reveals our province, and our city, as they change slowly, but surely--as the ox carts and teepees of our ancestors give way to train cars and apartment blocks.
And at the Millenium Library, noted local muralist and Vault Gallery co-director Charlie Johnston presents his own wry take on what it means to be Canadian.
In the WAG's historical show, an early work by W. Frank Lynn shows a scene from the Forks, as it looked sometime around the 1870's. The landscape, of course, is instantly recognizable--the low dip on the southwest bank, for example, or the Assiniboine River leading off into the prairies.
An ox cart heads down the riverbank towards a ferry, while a Metis man, wearing the traditional sash, smokes a pipe in the foreground.
Compare this to a 1945 work by St. Boniface artist Marie Guest. While Guest's work shows the exact same perspective as Lynn's, looking out from St. Boniface and across the Forks, the differences are striking.
In her work, a bridge now cuts across the river, tall buildings bump up against the clouds, and all around are the signs of a bustling city.
And so in the span of one lifetime, the period of time that passes between Lynn's 1870's work and Guest's 1945 work, we see a remote fur trade post transform into a booming modern city.
William Kerulek's 1963 painting Despondency shows a farmer whose cart has bogged down in a flooded field, while a train glides by in the distance. One of the more interesting and enigmatic artists our city has yet to produce, Kurelek shows here the contrast between old and new, in the figure of the aging farmer and the sleek modern train.
Over at the library, Charlie Johnston, through a series of caricatures, paintings and drawings of famous Canadians, pokes fun at our seriousness, while exploring and celebrating what--if anything--it means to be Canadian.
One work, for example, parodies Grant Wood's famous American Gothic, replacing the stern farmer couple with Laura Secord and Tommy Douglas.
A whole cast of other figures show up, from former Prime Ministers Kim Campbell and Jean Chretien to David Suzuki, Louis Riel and Adam Beach.
In looking at our legends, our heroes, our "villains", and our flag, Johnston holds a fun-house mirror up to the face of our country, and what we see back is, in a word, silly. But good.
So you don't necessarily have to go to a graveyard to discover your roots--Canadian identity, whatever the heck that means, is all around us. It's in the expressions we use, the places we work, and so on.
It's our own history, almost all that we have so far as a new people, and it's there for us to read--in our graveyards, and in our art.

Winnipeg Free Press, August 23, 2007

(Buswoman, by Evin Collis. Photo by Lorne Roberts).

Walking Paintings, by Justin Waterman
Piano Nobile Gallery, Centennial Concert Hall, 515 Main St.
To Oct. 22

Street Buzz, by Evin Collis
Wayne Arthur Gallery, 186 Provencher Blvd.
To Aug. 29

So, even though this article is about two artists who happen to be a few years younger than him, let's start with Clarence Tillenius anyway, since he's practically a legend around these parts.
No, the 94-year old wildlife artist (and member of the Order of Canada) doesn't have a new show, but he was in attendance at the opening reception for someone else's show the other night.
Looking a few decades younger than his age might suggest, Tillenius was the life of the party--shaking hands, charming the young ladies, and telling stories to spellbound groups of listeners.
The show he attended was by local painter Justin Waterman, at the Concert Hall. Waterman is only in his mid-30's, but, like Tillenius, seems to keep getting younger every year.
And the exhibit amounts to what is his first major solo show, an exciting proposition for a guy who has toiled away in relative obscurity, for years, with not much reward beyond personal satisfaction.
Those who have seen Waterman's work over the last several years, though, mostly at the Label Gallery, will realize that he tirelessly re-works and re-invents his techniques, constantly growing and changing as a painter--learning on the go, basically, since this Sisler grad has almost no formal art training.
His exhibit celebrates nostalgia, family, and art in all its forms--high, low, and everything in between. There are homages to comic book art, there are portraits, landscapes, abstraction, and a series of pieces that look at performers from violinists to strippers to clowns.
And as you'd expect, the strongest works are those that are closest to the artist's heart, either in the images painted from old family photos, or the stylized portraits of himself, his wife, and their two children.
At a very different stage of his career is 18-year old Evin Collis, currently a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design, in Toronto.
Barely a year out of Grant Park high school, Collis has put together an ambitious show of 16 paintings and three sculptures.
Borrowing from the likes of American graffiti artists Jean-Michael Basquiat and Phillip Guston, without ever losing his own vioice, Collis creates a series of lively, colourful Winnipeg street scenes.
The most noteable feature, once you get past the initial aspects of colour and design, is the sympathy that Collis seems to have for his subjects.
In Buswoman, for example, one of the simpler works in the show, a thoughtful, thirty-something woman rides public transit, with only a truck, a fly, and a Portage Avenue sign, to keep her company.
A few years back, when they featured a review of Marcel Dzama's work, Canadian Art magazine asked a rhetorical question about his insight into such a wide variety of human emotions. "Isn't he too young to know this stuff?", the reviewer wondered.
And while he's no Dzama just yet, it's a question that's worth asking about Collis's work, too. His portrayals of fry cooks, street people, and sad-eyed young gangsters, show an understanding of the quirks, sufferings, and energy, of everyday Winnipeg.
Cobbled together from his imagination and from his observations, the works incorporate touches of unreality, such as his relocating of the century-old Woodbine Hotel, from its current Main Street spot, to the Corydon Village strip.
Both of these artists also have work on at other places around town right now. They're in a group show, with twenty other others, at the Label Gallery (510 Portage Ave.). Waterman is also part of another group show at cr8ery, a gallery and studio space on the corner of William and Adelaide.
So, at different points in their lives, and their careers, these two are just beginning to step into the public eye, with their first solo exhibits. If they're lucky to stick around as long as Tillenius has, it'll be worth seeing what they're up to when they're 94.

From Galleries West-- web reviews

MANITOBA: Cliff Eyland: Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives, Sept 21 to Oct 21

http://www.gallerieswest.ca/Manitoba/Winnipeg/Departments/ExhibitionReviews//6-107283.html

MANITOBA: Cliff Eyland: Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives, Sept 21 to Oct 21, Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg

Girl.tif, Cliff Eyland, 2003 - 2004, digital Photoshop file, 12.7 cm x 7.6 cm

Since at least 1981, Cliff Eyland has been working in tiny, file-card sized paintings, mostly on board. He’s exhibited widely with the style, including an ongoing installation project in the Raymond Fogelman Library at the New School University in New York, in which he's slipped thousands of painted library cards into library books, to be checked out by unsuspecting patrons. He recently installed a two-storey stack of over a thousand small works at Winnipeg's Millennium Library.

But in spite of its consistent medium, Eyland's work has always defied description, falling somewhere between abstraction and figurative work, seeming to combine the recognizable with the baffling.

In his latest exhibit, showing at the University of Winnipeg's Gallery 1C03, Eyland has given us a gallery full of fictive cellular telephones, cameras, and computer hard drives, all as paintings on board or as combinations of paint and stuck-together objects. And as always, the work defies easy description or categorization.

In addition to a quiet electronic track that fills the gallery with sound—a new addition for an Eyland exhibit—the walls are adorned with useless technological devices, creations that somehow claim or aspire to be more than what they are. In Eyland's world, two pieces of board stuck together with some yellow paint between them and a useless power cord dangling beneath, becomes a hard drive. Useless cameras, stationed near the gallery's ceiling, become useful for photo shoots which Eyland's written guide tells us would probably go more smoothly, since the model knew that no pictures were being taken. The cell phones are often blobs of paint on board, or use chewing gum packets as keypads, and all make little claim to be functional as anything other than art—wherein lies much of the show's deadpan sense of humour.

	untitled (cellphone), 2006, acrylic, enamel spray paint and gum packet on MDF board, 12.7 cm x 7.6 cm

For example, the guide explains drily that other works are "imaginary cellphones that are only useful for talking to oneself or someone within earshot", or that "the keypad on this phone doesn't work because the buttons are made of smeared paint."

In addition to works spaced evenly across the walls, Eyland has made the room's actual electronic components—light switches, thermostat, and alarm keypad—the centrepieces for groupings of his own works.

There's been discussion for a while now about a specifically Winnipeg style of art, exemplifed perhaps by the recent Supernovas exhibit at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The suggestion is that it's work by serious artists that still manages to avoid taking itself too seriously. Think of this idea, and names like Marcel Dzama and the Royal Art Lodge, collage artist and gallery owner Paul Butler, or members of the 2-6 collective immediately come to mind. It's interesting that Eyland has been writing about these artists for years, since that particular style often seems to be so present in his own work.

It's no coincidence that, under another hat—that of fine arts professor at the University of Manitoba—Eyland has taught painting to an entire generation of Winnipeg's young artists who, to some degree or another, could be thought to be bearing his influence.

In this latest exhibit, with its useless technology imposed around the real, so much of what's made the "Winnipeg" style can be seen—it's work that's seems playful in tone, but raises questions about perception and images, and is the product of a relentless and determined practice of art-making.

— BY Lorne Roberts