The Arts

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Cutting-edge gallery re-opens with more Pole-arizing art

By: Alison Mayes

Posted: 08/28/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

From left, Plug In director Anthony Kiendl, painter Eleanor Bond and Noam Gonick, president of the Plug In board, gather around Jimmie Durham’s sculpture. (WAYNE.GLOWACKI@FREEPRESS.MB.CA)

Turn on, Plug In, drop in

-- Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art has staked out the high-profile corner of Portage Avenue and Memorial Boulevard in a new building with an eye-catching white exterior. The 38-year-old gallery, formerly on McDermot Avenue, now co-owns and shares the Buhler Centre with the University of Winnipeg.

-- Plug In's leaders say the main objective of the move is to broaden and diversify its audience. They expect more than 800 people to pass through the building each day. The free gallery will continue to be "an institute for questioners," they say, where art is experimental and people go to be challenged.

-- The four-storey, $15-million, eco-friendly structure was designed by architects David Penner, Peter Sampson and Neil Minuk. Plug In is in the process of moving and won't unveil its first shows until Nov. 6.

-- The pure white of the exterior continues inside, but there are vivid pops of wall and ceiling colour as you gaze up through the four-storey interior atrium. The exhibition spaces, totalling more than 3,200 square feet, have concrete floors and very high ceilings.

-- The largest of four galleries is a Class AA museum space that can host exhibitions requiring the highest international level of security and climate control.

-- McNally Robinson Booksellers will manage Plug In's new book, art and giftware store, which will carry more than 500 art, architecture and design titles. McNally is also said to be one of the bidders to run the bistro planned for the glass-walled "prow" of the building. The eatery is supposed to open by late fall.

-- Plug In's "Turn On" fundraising campaign has brought in $2.3 million. The goal is $4 million, including $1 million for a programming endowment.

The new home of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art was christened Thursday by Governor General Michaëlle Jean, who blurted in what seemed to be an unscripted finish to her speech, "Winnipeg is so edgy!"

In fact, Plug In sent a message with its first permanent artwork for the new downtown gallery -- a conceptual sculpture unveiled by Jean -- that it may have left the Exchange District, but it hasn't retreated from the edge.

Plug In commissioned Pole to mark the centre of the world (at Winnipeg) from Jimmie Durham, an American artist and activist of Cherokee heritage.

It's an upright piece of what looks like salvaged plumbing pipe, about 2.5 metres tall incorporating a red lever. Attached to the steel pipe is a small mirror, too high to reflect the viewer.

Its value is "tens of thousands" of dollars, says Plug In director Anthony Kiendl, but the artist has gifted it to the gallery. It will be permanently embedded, without a pedestal, in the floor of the building's foyer.

Filmmaker Noam Gonick, president of the Plug In board, acknowledged that to many Winnipeggers, the sculpture will look like "just a pole."

"It looks like a fallen piece of a sprinkler system," said Gonick, decked out in a white suit to echo the building. "(Durham) likes to use humble found objects and imbue them with a sense of great importance, in an ironic way.

"I think his message is that even in the smallest, most mundane, everyday objects, it's all (about) the power that you bring to something."

Gonick added cheekily that the sculpture reminded him of a stripper pole.

Pole to mark the centre of the world (at Winnipeg) is one of a series of poles created by Durham that each mark "the centre of the world" in places such as Brussels and Siberia.

Eleanor Bond, a senior Winnipeg painter and past president of the Plug In board, said it might look like "a bit of odd plumbing," but expresses Durham's humour and represents "a very poetic use of humble materials to speak of something very grand.... monumental and un-monumental at the same time."

Bond gets the honour of the first exhibition in the largest gallery in the new space. The show of more than a dozen new paintings will be called Eleanor Bond: Mountain of Shame.

In an interview, Kiendl also revealed the three other shows that will open Nov. 6 and run to Jan. 2:

-- A. A. Bronson, a former Winnipegger who was part of the General Idea collective and now lives in New York, will have a show of new silkscreen prints called We are the revolution.

-- Saskatoon aboriginal artists Lori Blondeau and Adrian Stimson will present their performance installation Putting the WILD back into the West: starring Belle Sauvage & Buffalo Boy. The show includes a set of Wild West costumes in which visitors can dress up and have their photo taken.

-- Shezad Dawood, based in London, England, will show A Mystery Play. It's a 12-minute looped film installation about Winnipeg's Gothic history, with an "architectural intervention" that recreates the façade of a building.

In January, Plug In will be one of several local galleries involved in a major show organized by Winnipeg Cultural Capital of Canada 2010. Kiendl said the show of more than 30 indigenous artists from around the world, titled Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, may be the largest exhibition of contemporary aboriginal art ever organized in North America.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 28, 2010 C3

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