Image by Don Gill, from www.erraticwinnipeg.blogspot.com
Erratic Space, by Don Gill
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd. (and www.erraticwinnipeg.blogspot
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
