Destined for Dumpsters

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supplied photos Emily Rosamond has taken over Aceartinc. and filled it with random discarded debris, which she is in the process of turning into sculpture, mobiles and other works of art.

Artist Emily Rosamond is taking in the trash at Aceartinc. this month.

At the beginning of June, local company Declutter.ca dropped off one ton of construction debris, discarded household items and weird miscellaneous junk at the gallery. The 30-year-old Rosamond, working 12-hour shifts from late afternoon to the middle of the night, has been sifting through this mess of possibilities, attempting to transform 900 kilograms of random stuff into meaningful sculptural pieces.

The process is now at midpoint, with one side of the gallery packed with material and the other pristinely empty. Reflecting our culture's binge and purge mentality, in which the desire to have way too much alternates with the sudden urge to strip bare the garage or attic or basement, the show examines wastefulness and consumerism.

But the Montreal-based Rosamond is also drawn to these objects. She's clearly fascinated with the secret life of things, finding a poignant pull in a collection of novelty salt and pepper shakers, discovering unexpected formal beauty in the curves of old bedsteads or rolls of roofing shingles. Some of the junk carries mysterious back-stories, like the Communist newspaper found embedded in a basket of knitting.

Wrangling this material into sculptural assemblages -- hanging mobiles, dizzying stacks of chair parts, balls wrapped in twine, Sputnik-style satellites of expandable foam -- Rosamund gives it a strange and wonderful second life.

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The Loch Gallery is currently showing William Kurelek's original illustrations for Who Has Seen the Wind, W.O. Mitchell's classic 1947 novel of a boy coming of age in Saskatchewan in the 1920s and '30s. Gallery owner David Loch recently arranged the sale of the works -- he was determined to keep the collection together -- and the eight paintings and 32 drawings are on a short tour of Calgary, Toronto and now Winnipeg before going to their new owner.

Created for the 1974 edition of the book, Kurelek's illustrations are both modest and masterful, drawing out the book's themes while creating lovely self-contained worlds of their own. As with Mitchell's words, their plainspoken prairie tone builds cumulatively to something very subtle, in this case, a child's growing apprehension of the mysteries of life, birth and death.

The paintings are beautiful, some with a characteristically long prairie horizon line and white clouds climbing up into an endless blue sky. They were framed by Kurelek himself in what looks like the grey, weathered wood of a Saskatchewan barn.

And while drawings are often ignored as the plain Janes of the art world, Kurelek's pen-and-ink sketches are proof of the medium's quiet power. Expressive, economical and utterly charming, these pieces convey a great deal with a gesture, a look, or the careful placement of sparse Depression-era objects.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

ART REVIEW

Emily Rosamond: Night Shift

At aceartinc., 290 McDermot Ave. until June 31

William Kurelek: Who Has Seen the Wind

At Loch Gallery, 306 St. Mary's Rd. until June 20

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 17, 2010 D5