"MY WINNIPEG: THE ARTISTS' CHOICE": Feb. 9, 2013 to March 17, 2013, Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, MB

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"Triumphant Return"

Paul Cherwick, "Triumphant Return," 2013, polychromed wood. Photo credit: William Eakin.

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"Ghostown," 2011, "and Ladder to the Moon"

Steven Nunoda, "Ghostown," 2011, "and Ladder to the Moon," 2012, die-cut tarpaper/wood, sumi paper, projected video, installation view. Photo credit: William Eakin. 

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"Triumphant Return"

Paul Cherwick, "Triumphant Return," 2013, polychromed wood. Photo credit: William Eakin.

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My Winnipeg: The Artists’ Choice

Feb. 9, 2013 to March 17, 2013

Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, MB

By Kenton Smith

Mere landmarks cannot summarize a given place – it “is” only insofar as it’s seen and lived by its individual inhabitants.

It’s thus appropriate that Winnipeg itself is mostly nary to be seen in The Artists’ Choice, the fourth and final instalment of the My Winnipeg project, ongoing since September 2012. The cityscape is visible only in David Wityk’s photomontage Main Street Winnipeg: Every Block Between Portage and Inkster Avenues, which unfurls across two walls and frankly visualizes the high and the low, intermittently side by side and face to face, as the city’s past and present top-down developments co-mingle with dreary dilapidation and even squalor.

More accurately, the exhibition is often a kind of “My Life” by 14 Winnipeg artists nominated by participants in the project’s earlier chapters. Sometimes, though, we wonder at the exact connection. Take Paul Cherwick’s Triumphant Return in polychrome wood, with a wee lad in pajama bottoms, socks and mask carrying the hide of an animal, Hercules-like. One has to circle round back to see the presumably vanquished (toy?) bear. There’s a smile-wresting Rockwellian quality, wherein childhood innocence and disappointment naturally overlap.

The notion of My Winnipeg functions as more of a loose framework – although that’s no reflection of the overall, affecting quality on display (some otherwise splendidly engaging video shorts seem out of place, however, treated as installation). Alternately whimsical, poignant, melancholy, bittersweet, dry, tongue-in-cheek, and recurringly understated, the art also often explores – as did the project’s original inspiration, filmmaker Guy Maddin’s 2007 personal documentary, My Winnipeg – the terrain of dreams, fancies and the fantastical.

Two selections from photographer Steven Ackerman’s Night 2 on the Roseau 4 & 17, for instance, push beyond the bounds of the concretely observable world: In one, the glow from inside the pictured tents takes on a supernatural aura, as if produced by fairies; in the other, tents obscured by shadow almost resemble toadstool houses. Steven Nunoda’s moody Ghostown consists of row upon row of miniature black barns moodily spot lit in a darkened gallery, while his adjacent Ladder to the Moon – a literal visualization of its title – suggests, in juxtaposition, that dreams are, perhaps, the only escape route from the melancholy of a rural prairie existence.

A piece that appropriately juxtaposes to that is Richard Hines’ C-print and etched glass piece, D’s Shoulder and K, Summer 2011, Cape St. George Newfoundland, which brings to mind The Weakerthans’ signature I Hate Winnipeg: The featured text “Why did we leave where we were to come over here?” is a lament familiar to many a Winnipegger, while also poignantly expressing the essence of a life lacking sure purpose.

Memory and personal geography are also among the exhibition’s defining themes, the latter being the seemingly explicit subject of Erica Eyres’ Father and Son, Wedding Day and Portrait of a Girl, pencil-on-paper pieces that reproduce photographs. The relative crudeness does not make them merely poor copy jobs, but rather evocations of the imprecise, fudging nature of memory. (By contrast, the clarity of the drafting in the third piece suggests a more specific recollection.)

Geography is literally written on the body in the case of Jamie Black’s Blood Memory series, whose powerful red-on-B&W photographic print is arresting on an aesthetic level even before the theme resonates. Using a model as landscape, Black conceives the coursing veins beneath the flesh as maps, and, in one print, literally has a river running through. It’s the show’s most direct expression of the inseparable nature of geography and personal identity.