Lost & found

Ryan Smoluk’s Maze City, on now at WAG-Qaumajuq, is a full circle moment.

The Winnipeg visual artist took art classes as a kid at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, his work first exhibited there as part of Through the Eyes of a Child.

Since then, his art — informed by his perspectives and experiences as an artist with autism — has been exhibited internationally, and Smoluk has worked with the United Nations, the New York Stock Exchange, Apple, the Manitoba Government, Manitoba Opera Society, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and a host of others.

And now, his work is back on the walls of the WAG, this time in his first solo exhibition at the city’s largest gallery.

“It has been a dream of mine, and now it’s a dream I can share with other people,” Smoluk says on a recent afternoon in the gallery space.

Curated by Riva Symko, head of collections and exhibitions at WAG-Qaumajuq, Maze City showcases the breadth of Smoluk’s practice, which spans painting, sculpture, assemblage and mixed media, and invites the viewer to wander through the unknown.

That’s also how Smoluk approaches art making, anyway. He likes to push himself out of his comfort zone.

“It’s like something David Bowie said: when you go out into the deep end, you can make some remarkable things. You got to be uncomfortable with going further,” he says.

‘It has been a dream of mine, and now it’s a dream I can share with other people.’

And be OK with getting lost, sometimes, too. The title work, 2019’s Maze City, is a surrealist assemblage that captures the disorientation of exploring a new place — or perhaps falling down the rabbit holes in one’s own mind. More details are revealed the more you look at it: a tiny graveyard and a 1920s-style moon hidden in a maze of tentacles and typewriters. But when you stand back to observe the whole, you see it’s Smoluk’s take on a pinball machine — complete with ball and paddles.

It should come as no surprise that Smoluk likes to work with dreams. “That’s my secret ingredient,” he says.

Other works, however, are inspired by waking, living nightmares. Horrors of Plastic in the Ocean, for example, is a 2014 work featuring the outline of a shark, lined with pink LED lights. The cavity of the shark is crammed full of found plastic objects: dinosaurs, rubber snakes, doll heads, cosmetic containers, sword-shaped cocktail picks, a Thomas the Tank Engine, a plastic fork.

Smoluk was inspired by terrifying photographs of dead sea birds, their bodies so filled with plastic it looked like they had exploded right there on the beach.

“I just thought, you know what? This is not too much different from us as people. We fill our life with all these things and think that we’re going to be fulfilled, but all the while it’s killing us,” he says.

Smoluk finds objects for his assemblage pieces “everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.” There’s a lot of collecting involved, which is a slow process. Some pieces take him years to complete.

“For a while, you just have to hold this thing and think, what can I do with this? Each individual (thing) is kind of like a story unto itself.”

Smoluk’s not interested in shortcuts. That’s what frustrates him about people using AI to create “art,” and people who want the satisfaction of having created without doing any creating.

“They don’t want to go from, like, A to B to C. They just want to get the reward,” he says.

“I’m thinking, where’s the hard effort? What did you do? What did you obtain during the journey, too? That’s an important thing. It’s another type of consumerism; we fill ourselves with this AI slop and it’s another form of garbage.”

Working in different ways, in different media, allows Smoluk express different ideas, but it’s also a chance for him to wade out into new deep ends creatively.

“I think you should travel through every type of medium. Again, it’s the journey and what you obtained during it that is really the most important thing, not just the destination and what you accumulate.”

The journey through the maze, as it were.

Maze City is on view until May 2027.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com