For the first exhibition in the cycle, we have artist and director of the Mus\u00e9e International des Arts Modestes in S\u00e8te, Herv\u00e9 di Rosa, to thank for convincing Antoine de Galbert of the merit of Winnipeg\u2019s artistic production.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - The exhibition will also be presented at the MIAM in S\u00e8te and at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg (2011-2012).<\/span> There seems to be renewed interest in shows based on particular art scenes, as evinced by the recent showcasing of work by Arab and Indian nations. But the strength of My <\/em>Winnipeg<\/em>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - My Winnipeg<\/em>, presented at La maison rouge in Paris, June 23 to September 25, 2011.<\/span> probably lies in how it managed to bring attention to the local scene without conjuring a fixed or self-referential identity, while avoiding a hegemonic representation of the discourse on contemporary art. Focusing on a city rather than on a nation also shows that the construction of artistic identity is principally channelled through the appropriation of shared territory or spatiality. Another interesting aspect of the exhibition is its programming: the presentation of the city also serves as an inspiration to travellers. Conceived as a tourist guide, the catalogue is intriguing in itself: artist presentations intermingle with information on climate, geography, and history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first section of the exhibition, Rien ne vaut son chez-soi <\/em>(There\u2019s No Place Like Home<\/em>), which curator Sigrid Dahle conceived around a divan\u2009\u2014\u2009part psychoanalyst\u2019s office, part archive\u2009\u2014\u2009proposes a topography of Winnipeg\u2019s imaginative world. Documents, photographs, postcards, films, posters, along with fictional works portray the territory\u2019s hostile reality. While for many Europeans, Winnipeg may only conjure the wonderful world of Winnie the Pooh3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - The city isn\u2019t the bear\u2019s birthplace, but of his owner, who took him across the Atlantic to become a Canadian curiosity in the London Zoo, which inspired A.A.Milne\u2019s storybook character and later Disney adaptations.<\/span> or the birthplace of Harlequin publishing, the reality seems rather less beguiling. This city of 700,000 inhabitants\u2009\u2014\u2009whose Cree name signifies \u201cwhere the muddy waters meet\u201d\u2009\u2014\u2009was the theatre of lasting struggles: frequent floods leading to massive evacuations, extremely harsh winters, plagues of mosquitoes, potholes in all the streets (Winnipeg may be the only city in the world that has a phone app to locate them). Add to that a traumatic social history, courtesy of its colonial past, its isolation, the hardships undergone by the nations that have come and gone, the sectarian conflicts, and class struggle.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - My Winnipeg, guide de la sc\u00e8ne artistique<\/em> (Lyon: Fage \u00c9ditions, 2011).<\/span> This section of the exhibition also has a predilection for ghosts and spiritualism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, physician Thomas Glendenning Hamilton specialized in s\u00e9ances, during which he produced a large number of spiritualist photographs. Winnipeg then is a haunted city, the outcome, in Dahle\u2019s words, of a \u201cgothic unconscious,\u201d a dark unease tinged with depressive sadness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second part of the exhibition, entitled Red River, lacs gel\u00e9s et paysages int\u00e9rieurs <\/em>(Red River, Frozen Lakes and Inner Landscapes<\/em>), placing more emphasis on great open spaces, only confirms the first assessment. Featuring Guy Maddin\u2019s black and white film My Winnipeg, <\/em>whose leitmotif urges Winnipeggers to wake up and flee, Maddin\u2019s personal memories intermingle with rather rancorous local anecdotes, in a style reminiscent of 1930s cinema. One gets used to sadness, Maddin says, but even when you manage to leave, the city\u2019s image follows you: You can leave, but you can never check out.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - AA Bronson, We are the Revolution<\/em>, 2010, cited by Robert Enright in \u201cWinnipeg: l\u2019art du confort par temps froid, My Winnipeg, guide de la sc\u00e8ne artistique<\/em>, op. cit., 61.<\/span> Indeed, Maddin believes that he is fulfilling a life-saving mission by discouraging people from going to Winnipeg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this section, there are also dioramas by Marcel Dzama, Kent Monkman, and Diana Thorneycroft, evoking improbable scenes related to Winnipeg culture. Monkman\u2019s diorama, The Collapsing of Time and Space in an Ever-expanding Universe<\/em>, for instance, presents a plush 19th-century living room whose disarray suggests the presence of a depressive mind. Nature has begun to take over the parlour; a beaver is gnawing at the foot of a desk; crows are croaking. At the back of the room, a long-haired character in a nightgown whom we only see from behind is sitting in an armchair facing the window. Moving around the space, we become aware that he is a Native American transvestite shedding black tears. What he\u2019s contemplating through the window is a classical tableau portraying him riding bareback among free-roaming bison. This improbable character, Native transvestite Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, is the alter ego of the part-Cree artist, a character whom he stages in his performances, films, and photographs. This modern vision of the \u201ctwo-spirited\u201d berdache\u2009\u2014\u2009a body housing both a male and female spirit, as traditionally described by First Nations societies\u2009\u2014\u2009symbolizes the normalizing violence of cultural confrontation during the European colonization, when these nuanced souls were labelled perverts and sodomites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A significant amount of space is given to Sarah Anne Johnson\u2019s project House on Fire<\/em>, which dramatizes another traumatic personal experience, here associated with the experiments the CIA conducted on the artist\u2019s grandmother in the fifties and sixties when she was being treated for post-partum depression at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montr\u00e9al. Conducted secretly at the clinic, without consulting the patients\u2019 families, the trials aimed to study the effects of certain drugs on brainwashing, mind control, and behaviour modification. Press clippings, family photos heavily overlaid with decorative motifs, bronze sculptures, and a scale-model house all help exorcise this agonizing period, representing the phobias and hallucinations her grandmother experienced following the experiments: her head in a block of ice, limbs engulfed in plant-like tendrils.\u2009.\u2009. The rooms of the house are no less hallucinatory, with the topsy-turvy furniture swamped in drifts of snow or vegetation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trauma also seems to crystallize in the monomaniacal project Ice Fishing in Gimli<\/em>. For eight years, Rob Kovitz built up an encyclopaedic account of ice fishing in Gimli, tirelessly compiling every scrap of information that could be related through a play of free association. The outcome: eight volumes, totalling 4,450 pages of text and images, testimony to a truly alarming obsession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition also reserves an important place for collective work in Winnipeg art production. One wall, for instance, is dedicated to Paul Butler\u2019s Collage Parties<\/em>, a travelling workshop he\u2019s been organizing since 1997, which betrays the influence of the Winnipeg School of Art\u2019s penchant for surrealism. Artists regularly gather around materials provided by Butler\u2009\u2014\u2009magazines, glue, beer\u2009\u2014\u2009to produce collages. Here they\u2019re part of the Keyhole Project, for which Guy Maddin asked Butler to set up collage sessions that would help generate a future feature-length movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The collective dimension is also represented by the Royal Art Lodge, a group active in the 1990s and early 2000s whose members6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Mainly Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Jon Pylypchuk, and Adrian Williams.<\/span>\u2009\u2014\u2009all Winnipeg art students\u2009\u2014\u2009would gather for drawing sessions. Most of the works shown were produced during such encounters. Characterized by the use of graphic techniques on small-scale formats (ink and watercolours on yellow sheets dated with an ink stamp or by hand), they seem to emerge, as Herv\u00e9 di Rosa puts it, from an \u201calternate past.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Herv\u00e9 di Rosa, \u201cPourquoi Winnipeg?\u201d, My Winnipeg<\/em>, op. cit., 8.<\/span> Jon Pylypchuk, now living in Los Angeles, presents paintings and sculptures produced from recycled objects, resembling both outsider art and local crafts but with a vindictive strain in their message. Characters in a volcanic decor attempt to reach another character bearing an American flag and a kind of phylactery on which one can read: \u201cWelcome to America fuck faces.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition concludes with the representation of a sultry, libidinous Winnipeg. Noam Gonick\u2019s Winter Kept Us Warm<\/em> reminds us that Winnipeg is also a locus of lesbian activism and radical feminism. The section includes a filmed performance of Totentanz<\/em> by Sharon Alward, produced in 1990 at Plug In. Having poured gallons of blood and sperm on the ground, the artist attempts to clean it up with ridiculously inadequate means: tireless work evoking the role of health providers during the AIDS epidemics. The performance sparked local controversy when the city Mayor subsequently refused to enter the gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Winnipeg\u2019s relative isolation, the absence of rivalry among its artists, and the recognition of shared local influences (like those of the WAG\u2019s Inuit art collection in the first productions of the Royal Art Lodge) contribute to the existence of a true art scene. Marcel Dzama likens this sense of belonging to identifications one might have with a mythological site. Despite its melancholy image\u2009\u2014\u2009The<\/em> Times<\/em> (London) dubbed the city World Capital of Sadness for four years running\u2009\u2014\u2009Winnipeg remains a nexus of stimulating art.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Thorneycroft_Early-Snow-with-Bob-and-Doug-scaled.jpg\")
Early Snow with Bob and Doug<\/em>, 2005.
Photo: \u00a9 Diana Thorneycroft, courtesy of Art M\u00fbr, Montr\u00e9al & Galerie Fran\u00e7oise Paviot, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Thorneycroft_Group-of-Seven-Awkward-Moments.jpg\")
Group of Seven Awkward Moments (Maples and Birches with Winnie and the Pooh)<\/em>, 2008.
Photo: \u00a9 Diana Thorneycroft, courtesy of Art M\u00fbr, Montr\u00e9al & Galerie Fran\u00e7oise Paviot, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Dzama_The-Lotus-Eaters.jpg\")
The Lotus Eaters<\/em>, 2005-2007.
Photos: courtesy of David Zwirner, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Dzama_The-Lotus-Eaters-2.jpg\")
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On the Banks of the Red River<\/em> (detail), \u00addiorama, 2008.
Photo: Marc Domage, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Johnson_Family-Tree-scaled.jpg\")
Family Tree<\/em>, 2008; Black Out<\/em>, 2008.
Photos: \u00a9 Sarah Anne Johnson, courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC03_Lupien_Johnson_BlackOut-scaled.jpg\")
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Propelled Through Life by a Staggering Lack of Dignity<\/em>, 2007.
Photo: Marc Domage, courtesy of La maison rouge, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Johnson_House-on-Fire.jpg\")
House on Fire<\/em>, 2008; White Out<\/em>, 2008.
Photos: \u00a9 Sarah Anne Johnson, courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_AC01_Desmet_Johnson_White-Out-scaled.jpg\")
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