Heavy milestone

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This article was published 06/11/2010 (5692 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FOR Eleanor Bond, this weekend is a mingling of pride and shame.

Bond, one of Winnipeg’s most distinguished artists, is being recognized with the largest of four exhibitions as Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art holds the public opening tonight of its new gallery in the gleaming Buhler Centre.

“It’s a huge honour,” says the 62-year-old artist, who had her career-launching show at Plug In back in 1985 — when it was located above a luggage store on McDermot Avenue — and later did a long stint as its board president.

“Plug In is such an important part of my life here,” Bond says, noting that the gallery has given artists like herself a connection to the world scene, despite Winnipeg’s geographic isolation. “It helped many of us to feel we could stay here and still participate in culture that was both national and international.”

This is Bond’s first major local show in a decade. While she feels great pride in the milestone for Plug In and herself, shame is the central subject of her 22 new works. She created most of them this year, while on half-sabbatical from her job as an art professor at Montreal’s Concordia University (she still keeps her Winnipeg home in Crescent­wood).

The show is called Mountain of Shame, and the first thing a viewer sees is the mountain — a yellowy­green mound that looks vaguely like a vegetable. The sculpture is deliberately sized to relate to the human body, Bond says, as if it could be the lump of regret and emotional pain that we each carry around in our guts.

But its sulphurous colour also refers to industrial shame, notes the exhibition’s Vancouver-based curator, Helga Pakassar, who will send the show on tour following its run here.

Bond, who has always brought political and environmental concerns to her work, is exploring both our personal and cultural “psychic loads” of fear, grief, longing and self-loathing. The works’ titles include Tower of Tears, Another Thing We Carry Around and Big Fear.

Seven of the works are sculptures, most made of Styrofoam. A number of other works are made from so much globbed-on, piled-up oil paint that they’re displayed on tables and can be partly interpreted as landscapes.

“I’m obsessed with the possibilities of paint,” says the slim, soft-spoken artist.

Moving to such three-dimensionality marks a dramatic shift for Bond, who vaulted to an international career when her paintings were chosen for the 1987 Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

Known for large-scale oil paintings, she began making sculptures this year for the first time since her 1970s student days at the University of Manitoba. One of the reasons, she says, is that our lives have become so dominated by fleeting digital information. “To have things coalesce into a concrete, material form… seemed particularly important now,” she says.

Bond has always been interested in architecture and public space. That can still be detected in these works (she describes a painting called Brain as depicting “the architecture of thought.”) But she has moved away from the imaginary, aerial-view cityscapes that have been her signature into greater abstraction and more interior reflection.

Still, with her ongoing interest in cities, she calls it a “happy coincidence” that Plug In timed its big opening for this weekend’s international Winnipeg symposium on urban art, My City’s Still Breathing.

The largest work in Bond’s show, Happy Town, is actually “a geological mapping of the city of Hamilton,” she says.

It’s a massive painting of horizontal coloured stripes.

“I was interested in how you can describe a place… through sedimentary layers,” she says. “It starts from the lake bottom, then sludge from Stelco, then up through the older city into the downtown — where, like Winnipeg, they used colour as makeup to try to liven up the decrepitude and the dullness — …then up into the suburbs. It’s kind of an urban landscape.”

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

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