‘Awkward’ art a hit

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This article was published 29/07/2009 (6205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A pristine lake scene with Tom Thomson peeing out of a canoe? Algonquin Park with Bob and Doug McKenzie drinking beer? Lawren Harris’s Lake and Mountains with a G.I Joe doll and a Tim Hortons coffee?

Sorry, it’s not your parents’ Group of Seven.

Controversial Winnipeg artist Diana Thorneycroft has a national hit on her hands with her latest exhibition, Canada, Myth and History, which opened last week at the famed McMichael Canadian Art Collection north of Toronto.

The show consists of 10 Group of Seven originals alongside 21 Thorneycroft photographs spoofing the paintings of Canada’s best-known art movement.

Thorneycroft calls her photographs Group of Seven Awkward Moments. She has made them using tiny dolls, props and toys set against iconic G7 images.

In a full-page review in the Toronto Star on the weekend, critic Murray Whyte wrote that Thorneycroft is "fast becoming known as this country’s most engagingly provocative sacred cow-tipper."

At the official opening last week, Thorneycroft says, viewers laughed out loud.

"Strangers were coming up to me and shaking my hand," she said on Tuesday morning, just home from her successful Eastern sojourn.

"A few people even hugged me."

Thorneycroft, 52, got the inspiration for her series from Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2005, gallery officials sponsored a fundraising event for which they asked local artists to contribute Group of Seven images "with a twist."

She made her Bob and Doug photograph based on Thomson’s painting Early Snow from the Winnipeg Art Gallery collection.

Knowing she could do more with the idea, she contacted McMichael director Tom Smart, whom she knew from his days in the 1990s as a chief curator at the WAG.

He told her he’d consider an exhibition once she did the work. He even wrote a letter of support for her application to the Canada Council, which awarded her a major grant of $80,000 over two years.

The money enabled her to take a leave from her teaching job at the University of Manitoba school of fine art.

"It was such a gift," she said. "It was the most productive time of my life."

The first 15 images in the series were first shown last September at Michael Gibson’s commercial gallery in London, Ont. Canadian Art magazine listed the exhibition in its Top10 shows of 2008.

They have since been shown at commercial galleries in Toronto and Calgary. The 61-x-76-cm prints go for $2,500 and the 102-x-127-cm ones go for $4,000.

But this McMichael show, which has six new works and runs through Nov. 29, is the first public gallery exhibition.

"There is a lot of humour in them, but if you spend time with them you see a darker purpose," says McMichael curator Sharona Adamowicz-Clements. "She has a subtle way of oscillating between comedy and tragedy."

The McMichael, in Kleinburg, Ont., was the focus of a long court battle begun in the ’90s when the original donors of its Group of Seven collection tried, and failed, to prevent the institution from collecting and exhibiting contemporary art.

"Tom has been very respectful of history," Thorneycroft says. "The last thing he wants to do is repeat the tumultuous times they went through."

She says the McMichael has plans for a national tour of her Awkward Moments work. Both the WAG and Plug In have been approached, though nothing has been confirmed.

Thorneycroft is not the only Winnipeg photographer to make waves out East this summer. In early July, Sarah Anne Johnson premiered her new show, House on Fire, at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario — it is based on the brainwashing experiments used on her maternal grandmother Val Orlikow.

"It’s a stunning show," Thorneycroft says. "It’s so personal and poignant."

The friendly reaction to her Group of Seven spoofs is a change of pace for Thorneycroft, who has been vilified in the past, especially for her notorious dead-rabbit exhibition in 1999 and even her photographs of torture and bondage a few years later.

"When people get angry, that’s as valid a response as laughter," she says. "I try to get them to take ownership of their anger."

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca