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.
