A shore thing Paintings by Gilles Hébert’s lifelong friend Carolee Schneemann recall time spent on Manitoba beach On My Wall: Gilles Hébert, interim executive director, Plug In ICA
By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:21 PM CDT Wednesday, Sep. 17, 2025

On My Wall is a monthly feature exploring the pieces Manitoba artists and cultural workers proudly display.

Windsor, Ont., Edmonton, Saskatoon or his two-storey home in Winnipeg’s North End — no matter where Gilles Hébert’s career has taken him, four paintings by Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) have followed.

Hébert, the interim executive director of Plug In ICA, first met Schneemann in 1986, when the American renegade was one of 10 artists brought to Manitoba for the International Intermedia Performance Arts Festival.

“When she came to Winnipeg the first time, she brought her cat in her hand baggage on the plane without telling anybody,” says Hébert, who calls Schneemann the godmother of performance art.

The next summer, Schneemann — who in 2017 was recognized by the Venice Biennale with the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement — returned to Manitoba for a 10-day residency at Hébert’s cottage in Winnipeg Beach, where, inspired by the shoreline, she set out to create a collection of 100 synthetic stones, each one a composite of wood pulp, sand, leaves and male urine.

In September 1987, at Plug In’s former location at 175 McDermot Ave., Schneemann presented the resulting collaborative works, including wall-spanning banners, the hand-moulded stones and a video performance installation, wherein the artists moved on and between the rocks.

Called Polarity Burn, the installation explored the fraught relationship between bodily function and natural patterns of material formation.

The paintings hanging in Hébert’s dining room are small-scale recreations of those banners — no urine was used — featuring circular and ovular outlines, united by streaks of technical interference.

“Carolee was quite taken with the idea of video,” says Hébert. “If you look, you can see that there are horizontal lines running through these paintings. At that time, video signals sometimes had a white line that would go through them as the image was breaking down. These rocks were an interpretation of her thinking and considerations being made at that time on the beach.”

The visit to Manitoba led to a lifelong friendship between Schneemann and Hébert, who was working with the artist on a collaborative book about the malleability of memory at the time of her death. Hébert was worried whether his earliest memories were authentic. “She said, ‘Well you can make them up, can’t you? I can, too.”

Opening Friday, Plug In ICA presents Louise Witthöft and Rodney LaTourelle’s Betonwaves, in which the artists repurpose concrete salvaged from the ongoing renovations of the Hudson’s Bay Company building, reinterpreting the material for a site-specific installation of sculpture, space and furnishing. The show runs to Nov. 1.