Larger than life Portraits of queer artists command attention By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:19 PM CDT Wednesday, Sep. 11, 2024

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Before you even enter the gallery, you will see her.

The Indigenous visual artist Jessie Jannuska is painted in repose, the soft curves of her body — nude, save for a lingerie harness — sinking into plush fur. Her chin is held high and her eyes piercing, commanding. She is radiant, confident.

She takes up the entire back wall of Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg, visible through the gallery’s doors from the hallway.

Jessie in Blue is one of six larger-than-life oil paintings of queer Winnipeg artists that compose The In-Between, a solo exhibition by Winnipeg artist Laura Lewis, opening today.

Strikingly, Lewis’s subjects — which include Shaneela Boodoo, Mahlet Cuff, Christina Hajjar, Julian K., Malaikah Rang’inya and Jannuska — are making direct eye contact with the viewer.

“It’s very much a form of acknowledgment and is conceptually critical, as it’s in direct defiance of the male gaze and poses the question of: who is visible and who has the power to look?” Lewis says, sitting in the gallery space on a Monday morning, figuratively surrounded by her friends.

Lewis, 32, is a queer visual artist originally from Halifax, where she studied at NSCAD. When she moved to Winnipeg to complete her BFA honours at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, she found community.

“I just really felt at home when I moved here,” she says.

Lewis’s practice has always been rooted in figurative painting, a genre packed with cis-heteronormative baggage. What better way to challenge those notions than by painting her friends and fellow artists?

“I thought it was just going to be such an interesting exhibition with such a diverse group of artists, in terms of media, in terms of background,” she says. “That’s where it all started.”

The project began with a photo shoot in 2021. Lewis wanted her subjects — whom she considers collaborators — to have a lot of say in terms of how they’d show up on the final canvas.

“The photo shoot is a very key component to the work, because I do see it as a very collaborative process,” Lewis says.

The subjects all selected their own clothing — or lack thereof — and choices ranged from a bright orange ostrich-feather-trimmed dressing gown to classic pair of jeans. Everyone posed in ways in which they felt like themselves.

“For Deb (from Winnipeg), the artist Julian K. really wanted to do the painting in drag,” Lewis says. “It was such a fun moment really accentuating that androgyny with the beard and the really large blond curly wig and hyper-femininity.”

The exhibition will include responses to the work from the subject-collaborators, as a way to give them a platform as well.

“It was such a humbling experience to read the responses from the artists,” Lewis says. “I feel like it adds such a level of dynamism and I’m just so grateful that everyone was so excited to work with me on that.”

The paintings are big and bold and the size is the point.

“Conceptually taking up physical space in an institution as queer people, I think, is very important, very critical, especially in our current political state,” Lewis says. “Also, just as a painter, something I really enjoy is the physical act of painting. I’m often painting on a ladder or on the floor. It’s quite a physical undertaking.”

Works of this size allow viewers to engage with Lewis’s technique, her masterful work with colour, for example, and her juxtaposition of fine detail — in particular in the eyes and hands — and broad brushstrokes.

“If you look at the paintings up close, they kind of fall apart into abstraction,” she says. “So I do explore abstraction by virtue of scale and the image kind of comes together to make a realistic rendering when you’re further back from it.”

There are more paintings in this series — about 14 or 15 — but space limitations required Lewis and Jennifer Gibson, the show’s curator and director of Gallery 1C03, to narrow it down to six.

But Gibson knew which painting she wanted to anchor the space and that was Jessie in Blue.

“It’s just such a strong image,” Gibson says. “When I think about art history and images of women’s bodies in art history — maybe you think of Manet’s Olympia, for example — it’s the male gaze again. And this really flips that, for sure. I also think it’s just so important to see such a powerful image of a strong Indigenous woman so in command of the scene.”

Other programming related to the exhibition is on offer in the coming weeks, including a workshop with Julian K. called Queering the Figure on Oct. 1 at the greenhouse feminist artlab at the University of Winnipeg Library and a panel discussion with the artists on Nov. 7 in room 2M70 at the university.

The In-Between is on view at Gallery 1C03 until Nov. 8.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com