Local teams in running to design LGBTQ2+ monument

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This article was published 26/02/2021 (1694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two Winnipeg-linked teams of artists and architects are in the running to design a new national monument memorializing Canada’s history of discrimination towards LGBTQ2+ peoples.

“For us, the ability to work with the other team members is actually what made it attractive,” said visual artist Shawna Dempsey, who will work with longtime collaborator Lorri Millan on an all-Winnipeg team including architecture and landscape firm Public City and Albert McLeod, Indigenous and two-spirit adviser.

The team was long-familiar with each other’s work through “that Winnipeg thing,” Dempsey said, and found common passions in the goals of the project.

In an email Thursday, Canadian Heritage said the Ottawa monument — scheduled to be unveiled in 2025 — will memorialize “historic discrimination against LGBTQ2+ people in Canada, including those who suffered in the government of Canada-led LGBT Purge.”

The central site, on the northeast side of Wellington Street near the Portage Bridge, should have capacity to host large gatherings, and quiet contemplation.

The LGBT Purge refers to a 1950-90 period when members of the Canadian Armed Forces, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and federal public service were systemically harassed, discriminated against and often fired due to their sexuality, gender identity or gender expression.

“It’s personal. We lived through this recent history that includes the purge, but also legal and social discrimination against queer people,” Millan said. “The trauma is a part of our community and a part of our lives.”

Winnipeg-based filmmaker/sculpture artist Noam Gonick said he’s excited to be collaborating with Rebecca Belmore, New York architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Winnipeg’s HTFC Planning and Design on the project.

Gonick and Belmore (who hails from Lac Seul First Nation in Ontario) have been working together for 15 years.

Gonick dipped his feet into large-scale public art two years ago, designing Winnipeg’s “Bloody Saturday” commemoration of the 1919 General Strike.

It’s still too early to say what the local proposals will look like; plans from the five shortlisted teams are due in August.

The final design, Canadian Heritage said, should educate visitors, commemorate the “profound social, physical and psychological impacts of discrimination the community has suffered” — and celebrate those who fought for equality and inspire change for the future.

“We don’t want to make it seem as if this is all in the past. These are ongoing struggles,” said Dempsey. “We want whatever it is we create to not only memorialize past injustices but inspire greater justice and inclusion for all peoples going forward.”

Submissions will be judged by a jury of LGBT Purge survivors, experts in visual arts and architecture, and other key stakeholders. The public will also be invited to provide feedback before the winning design is chosen in late fall.

“I think it’s amazing that this monument is going to be constructed within sightlines of… institutions that have, at times, been oppressive to queer peoples,” Dempsey said. “With this monument we will become, in all of our diversity, an irrefutable presence — erased no longer, diminished no longer.”

julia-simone.rutgers@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jsrutgers