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