Mais Oui, C’est le Peg!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2011 (5452 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Portage and Main has landed in the City by the Seine.

My Winnipeg, a major exhibition celebrating our world-class artists and how this cold, isolated, culturally diverse meeting place has shaped their unique visions, opens tonight in Paris.

The landmark show of about 200 works by 71 artists will be on view until Sept. 25 at La Maison Rouge, a prominent non-profit contemporary gallery located in a former factory in the Bastille district.

Filmmaker Guy Maddin, painter Wanda Koop, photographer Sarah Anne Johnson and about 20 other artists are in France to help launch the high-profile showcase.

“You couldn’t ask for a better platform to expose Winnipeg culture,” says Anthony Kiendl, director of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, co-producer of the show with La Maison Rouge, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, the University of Manitoba’s Gallery One One One and the Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM), a gallery in the southern French city of Sète that will exhibit My Winnipeg from Nov. 5-May 20, 2012.

The show is occupying the entire Maison Rouge — an exhibition space about five times as big as Plug In’s new gallery at the corner of Portage Avenue and Memorial Boulevard. Organizers believe it will draw attention to Winnipeg as a site for cultural tourism and put an unprecedented spotlight on the city’s creative output.

“The curator of the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris says this is a once-in-50-years opportunity for any Canadian city,” Kiendl says. “It will be an important cultural moment.”

The show is the first of a series that Maison Rouge plans to devote to cities with little-known but thriving art scenes. It was a French painter named Hervé Di Rosa whose obsession with Winnipeg art sparked the project.

Di Rosa, who is in his early 50s and founded MIAM, is passionate about the surreal, naïve-looking, pop-culture-inspired work of Winnipeg’s Marcel Dzama and the now-disbanded Royal Art Lodge (founded in 1996), of which Dzama was a member. Di Rosa’s film-buff son is equally mad about Maddin’s movies and introduced his father to them.

In mid-2009, Di Rosa made a pilgrimage to Winnipeg, fascinated by how it could spawn such talent. “It’s like a puzzle that he’s trying to figure out,” says Kiendl.

A year later, the painter came back with the founder and director of Maison Rouge in tow — their trip included a Maddin movie-set visit — and the show was set in motion. It has funding from all three levels of government. Canada’s ambassador to France, Marc Lortie, will be at tonight’s opening.

My Winnipeg covers a timespan from an 1869 oil painting to works created this year, such as a new version of Daniel Barrow’s public-access TV compilation Winnipeg Babysitter. Genres range from prints, photographs, paintings and drawings to sculpture, ceramics and video installations.

In general, Kiendl says, the shared vocabulary that comes across as a Winnipeg signature is representational (not abstract), vernacular, fantastical/fictional and dreamlike.

The show takes its name from Maddin’s “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg, which is screening continuously as part of the show. Another Maddin contribution is a collection of 11 recent short films called Hauntings, which re-imagine lost silent films.

Making up roughly half the show is Winter Kept Us Warm, an erotic-themed exhibition curated by filmmaker Noam Gonick that was shown at the recent Prairie Scene festival in Ottawa. It explores Winnipeg as a “mytho-poetic territory of the body and desire” through the work of about 30 artists — names such as Sharon Alward, Paul Butler, Cliff Eyland, Karel Funk, Melanie Rocan and Diana Thorneycroft.

Gallery One One One’s Sigrid Dahle has curated There’s No Place Like Home, the other half of My Winnipeg that immerses the viewer in the city’s history and culture.

Dahle’s “introductory room” is like a huge collage, including archival photos of blizzards, floods and the Winnipeg General Strike; historical background on colonization and immigration; and works by artists ranging from Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald (Winnipeg’s member of the Group of Seven) to Thorneycroft’s cheeky spins on the Group of Seven, to the influential Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporation, known as the Indian Group of Seven.

The aim is to suggest some of the sources for “the Winnipeg imaginary.” Dahle says she is especially pleased to include quirky short films from the 1980s.

“A lot of the surreal, playful, cartoon-y, slightly dark-humoured work that’s in this exhibition, there’s a tendency to think that it started with the Royal Art Lodge,” she says. “But there were many artists in the ’80s doing work along those lines.”

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

 

Golden Boy

in City of Lights

 

The bilingual, 250-page exhibition catalogue for My Winnipeg — printed in France — is part travel guide, including not only scholarly essays but maps and briefings on geography, history and climate. There’s even a glossary of Winnipeg terms such as Garbage Hill, floodway, Golden Boy, pothole and Perimeter-itis.

 

La Maison Rouge is holding ancillary events known as Festif Winnipeg, including a master class by Guy Maddin, collage parties with Paul Butler and performances by artist Shary Boyle with musician Christine Fellows.

 

The My Winnipeg press kit describes our burg as “the capital of a remote and untamed region, Manitoba, where flooding and swarms of insects are regular occurrences. Winnipeg is also famous as the coldest city in the world.” Perhaps that text wasn’t highlighted when Travel Manitoba, Tourism Winnipeg and Franco-Manitoban tourism reps hosted a special exhibition tour Wednesday for more than 20 French travel journalists.

 

A scaled-down version of My Winnipeg will be shown at Plug In some time in 2012 as part of its 40th-anniversary celebration.