Room for a new view

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/03/2025 (230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS: I’ve been thinking recently about Ivan Eyre’s North Watch, located on the plaza outside the Richardson Building near the corner of Portage and Main. That’s partly because, like many Winnipeggers, I’ve had more time to look at it because I’ve been stuck in my car in construction-slowed traffic.

But I’m also thinking ahead to when the construction is done, and more pedestrians will be walking the sidewalks around the city’s most famous intersection. That’s when people will be able to experience this massive, monumental bronze sculpture as they should — in a one-on-one, on-the-ground physical encounter.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Eyre, who died in 2022 at age 87, was one of Manitoba’s most important and influential artists and teachers. He worked prolifically across media, and his drawings, paintings and sculptures have been shown in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions, locally, nationally and internationally.

Many of Eyre’s large-scale bronzes focus on hybrid human forms, filtering historical influences through his own introspective and obsessive imagination. These works stand somewhere between figurative realism and stylized abstraction, between stately classicism and unsettling surrealism.

Set on a raised platform, North Watch is made up of 80 bronze pieces and weighs over 1,100 kilograms. It features a seated man and a sitting dog, the two at right angles to each other. The pair seems to be keeping a lookout, though the man’s eyes, reduced to schematic slits, make his gaze feel unknowable and uncanny.

There are interesting tensions in the work. With its solid, symmetrical, hieratic stillness, North Watch seems to reference ancient Egyptian sculptures of seated figures. But there’s also a sense of crazy space-age futurism in the man’s outfit and accessories. (Is that a jetpack? Moon-boots? An astro-helmet?)

Then there’s the vibe, which different viewers might interpret differently. Is the man rooted and silently resolved? Is he menacing and militaristic? Is he maybe even a bit comical, with his super-stylized headgear and oversized, cartoonishly chunky hands and feet?

Eyre liked to leave things open. For such an imposing work, North Watch feels unusually ambiguous, even ambivalent. It really requires a long, up-close look.

WHY IT MATTERS: All artwork is best seen in-person rather than in photographic reproductions. But maybe more than any other medium, freestanding sculpture needs to be approached as a one-on-one physical encounter.

Sculpture occupies three-dimensional space like us. It physically interacts and engages with us. Take the way North Watch needs to be viewed from all sides, the dynamics between man and dog, between work and viewer, changing and shifting as we walk around it. Take the dog’s stare, so intent and alert that it extends out into our world, looking through and past us.

When the Portage and Main intersection opens again to foot traffic — fingers crossed for the scheduled date of July 1! — even more people will be passing under the eyes of Eyre’s enigmatic sentinels, and maybe stopping to wonder what man and dog are seeing and thinking.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca