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

From Galleries West Magazine, Spring 2007

(www.gallerieswest.ca)

Paradise On The Prairie

Detail from The Paradise Institute, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

Contemporary Art Draws a Crowd in Yorkton, Saskatchewan

In the past, selling tickets in small-town Saskatchewan may have involved the traveling circus, or an itinerant preacher passing through on horseback. These days, it’s more likely to involve a big game for the local junior hockey team. But in the Yorkton region recently, contemporary art has been bringing in the crowds. The Paradise Institute, an internationally celebrated video and audio installation with a strong prairie connection, was in town for three months in the fall of 2006, proving that smaller centres can sustain interest with special exhibitions that are unusual, challenging, and Canadian.

“The reaction to it has been absolutely fantastic,” says Brenda Sherring, former director of Yorkton’s Godfrey Dean Gallery, which brought the show in as a touring exhibition from the National Gallery of Canada. “We’ve had people come in saying they heard about it on the country music station, while they were out combining (the fields).”

Part of the key to the Godfrey Dean’s success is the work itself. The Paradise Institute, created by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, won the Special Jury Prize in 2001 at the Venice Biennale. But the Gallery also had the foresight to position this work as a must-see in their community. Taking a work of art highly recognized within visual art circles, but not widely known among the general public, could have been a gamble.

The Paradise Institute requires the audience to enter a small, three-dimensional replica of an old movie theatre and put on a pair of headphones. From there, they’re taken through a film and audio spectacle that questions the very notions of how we view movies—whether we’re simply passive viewers, or we actively participate in the fiction of movies by bringing our own ideas and expectations into the theatre with us.

	Outside the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

After its debut, The New York Times said the work “moves installation art to a different plane,” and explores “the unstable relationship between what seems real and what is.”

While Cardiff is from rural Ontario, Bures Miller hails from the prairies —he grew up in Vegreville, Alberta. Both also worked for many years in Lethbridge, Alberta, teaching and exhibiting at the University of Lethbridge and at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. But this work’s connections to western Canada go much deeper than that. The original installation was a co-production of Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA and The Banff Centre’s Walter J. Phillips Gallery, and its success in Venice launched the prairie provinces back onto the world’s visual arts map.

As co-commissioner of the project for Venice through Plug In ICA, Wayne Baerwaldt played a key role in the original creation and promotion of the work, and says that while its success may have been surprising, everyone involved knew before Venice that they had something special. “Our feeling was that if it fascinated us—and it did—then it should be able to move other people too,” he says.

Early in its exhibition history, Brenda Sherring, now the executive director of Saskatchewan Museums in Regina, first viewed The Paradise Institute in Banff. At that point, Sherring was working with a group of people who were committed to turning the Godfrey Dean Gallery into a true public art space. She correctly foresaw that bringing The Paradise Institute to town would help do just that.

	Detail from The Paradise Institute, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

“I contacted the National Gallery, and asked why it coudn’t just stop here as it went from Banff back east,” she says. “They said no, but I kept writing to justify why it should come out here to the prairies. Finally, about a year ago, they wrote and said they were going to release it on tour.”

So, a work that had been the toast of the international art world, and had shown in high profile museums and galleries across the country, was suddenly coming to small-town Saskatchewan.

Once it arrived, the ideas behind promoting the show were relatively straightforward, Sherring says. “We really focused on the spectacle of it, the fact that it was like the circus coming to town and that we had this piece of art that people all over the world would love to see.”

A promotional package aimed at schools proved to be a big success. More than 1,000 visitors saw the exhibition in October—with nearly 500 of them from local schools. Sherring adds that the show was such a hit that some of the kids came back to see it again on their lunch hour.

Some of the major themes behind The Paradise Institute—including the disruption of the normally comfortable movie-viewing experience —provided a perfect educational tool for reaching kids in a media-savvy culture.

“When the school groups came I would introduce the exhibition, talk about how, in art, you’re an active participant, especially with a work like this one,” Sherring says.

In addition, Sherring says that the exhibition pulled in artists from around the region, who were eager to see this celebrated work. “For (artists) here in a fairly isolated and rural part of the country, it’s so important to be able to participate in any kind of dialogue or exchange,” she says.

Baerwaldt, who grew up in Regina, has worked at major galleries in Winnipeg and Toronto, and is now the director and curator of exhibitions at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. He agrees with Sherring on the benefits of making this type of ground-breaking contemporary art accessible to people in all parts of the country. “It shows that the National Gallery can meet its mandate of bringing art to a wider audience,” he adds.

Judging by the enthusiastic public response at the Godfrey Dean, the lasting impact of The Paradise Institute in Yorkton can’t be overstated, Baerwaldt says. “For an artist who hasn’t been to Toronto, or a place where The Paradise Institute is showing, it gives them a sense of what’s possible,” he says. Its success in Yorkton, then, may eventually prove to be just as important to the future of Canadian art as its success in Venice.

— By Lorne Roberts

review of "From To"--Canadian Art Magazine, winter 2004

From/To

by Lorne Roberts

Plug In ICA, Winnipeg

In the math of the exhibition's title, "from" is lesser than "to." While this could be an allusion to a regional inferiority complex, the work itself centres on themes of transmission, movement and distance, all of which form a distinct, if unconscious, part of the prairie dweller's identity. In this case, the transmission consists of an exchange between Winnipeg and Minneapolis/St. Paul, cities linked by their isolation as major centres in overwhelmingly rural areas.

Kevin Friedrich's oil paintings use a deliberately bizarre mix of characters and ideas, combining neo-gothic excess with a wry sense of humour. In Hot Rod, a car is about to turn a blissfully ignorant cow into hot-rod jerky, and a physics-class line diagram of the car and driver gives the work a sense of movement and speed.

Piotr Szyhalski's work Your Time is Up!, painted directly onto the gallery wall, combines an image of a house tilted on its side with a projection that alternates between two phrases drawn from leaflets scattered by the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War: "Flee and preserve your life" is followed by "Or stay and face certain death." Here, the idea of movement is expressed by the juxtaposition of peaceful domesticity with terrified flight in the face of war.

In Mike Marth's Still Life, five telephones sit encased in concrete blocks. Marth dials their numbers intermittently, and each time one rings, the viewer is made aware of distance and disconnection, and of someone, hundreds of kilometres away, connected to the same impotent sound.

The work of Paul Zacharias complements Marth's. In his piece Information, paint has been applied using graffiti-style stencil patterns, and we see a bright window in a shadowy room, with a phone cord stretching towards the viewer and running off the canvas. There is a sense of the viewer holding the phone to their own ear, as though whatever information is being conveyed is intended for them directly.

If from is truly less than to, the origin less than the destination, then perhaps the transference that matters most in this exhibit is that which occurs between the artist and the viewer. The prairie-centred themes of the show are often concealed, and a closer look is required for a sense of how the artists engage with ideas of distance, movement and transmission. The artists have provided the from of creation, and the viewer completes the equation by providing the to of interpretation—a journey, it would seem, that is ongoing.

Winter 2004