Headlines

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Pierre Ayot, “Winnipeg Free Press,” 1981

silkscreen on stuffed canvas (collection of Winnipeg Art Gallery, photo by Lianed Marcoleta, courtesy WAG-Qaumajuq)

It’s been said that nothing is older than yesterday’s newspaper.

Art, however, has a different timeline, and in that gap – between the rush and crush of daily news and the longer, slower perspectives of art – you can see the smart, sneaky power of this group show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Headlines: The Art of the News Cycle, curated by the gallery’s head of exhibitions, Riva Symko, focuses on eight Canadian artists who work with materials and concepts that reference our fraught media environment. Vibrating between medium and message, as well as text and image, these works consider information overload, shrinking attention spans, the threat of “fake news,” along with the rapidly shifting forces – technological, social and economic – now shaping our media consumption.

The exhibition was developed in partnership with the Winnipeg Free Press, a local independent newspaper marking its 150th year. (Full disclosure: I’m a regular freelance contributor, currently writing on pop culture). Like the gallery, the paper has deep connections to the city, and provides a sense of local history through the loan of newsroom artifacts and archival materials.  

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Ron Gorsline, “I Read the News Today,” 1998

mixed media on canvas (collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, photo by Lianed Marcoleta, courtesy WAG-Qaumajuq)

Winnipeg-based printmaker Miriam Rudolph, commissioned to make a new work for this show, interacts specifically with the newspaper’s archives. Storied Land: (Re)Mapping Winnipeg reconfigures newspaper clippings going back to 1872 to craft a new narrative of the city and its settlement. For example, by foregrounding stories about Rooster Town, an urban Métis community destroyed to make way for a postwar shopping centre and suburban housing, she comments on the ways Indigenous histories have been covered (and sometimes covered over) by journalists. 

Manitoba artist Ron Gorsline’s I Read the News Today is a tactile painting of a figure peeking over a paper, its big brush strokes and hot, expressive colours suggesting that news consumption can be overwhelming and anxiety-producing – even back in 1998. 

Other artists counteract such feelings with works that are meticulously controlled. Montreal-based Myriam Dion transforms precisely cut newsprint into lace-like ornamented circles, using symmetry, repetition and gorgeous craft to slow down sometimes-threatening news events like the protests and forest fires described in the texts.

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Dianna Frid, “NYT, DEC 21 2013, JANET D ROWLEY” from the “Words from Obituaries” series, 2011-2022

canvas, paper, embroidery floss and graphite (photo by Tom Van Eynde)

Dianna Frid, whose practice spans Mexico, Canada and the United States, takes words from newspaper obituaries and uses the time-intensive craft of embroidery to replicate them in colour-coded hues on canvas. Her word breaks aren’t strictly textual (as with “ENJOYMYPHI / LANTHROPY”), making us pause a moment to unpack meaning while also considering the aesthetic possibilities of written language. 

Montreal sculptor Laurent Roberge fools us by presenting what seems to be a monumental slab of rock that is actually constructed from a zillion pieces of painstakingly glued coloured newspaper comics. The late Pierre Ayot’s Pop Art-inflected 1981 piece does the opposite. He promises the reassuring materiality of print media but then withholds it – what appears to be bound stacks of newspapers turn out to be silkscreened and stuffed canvas.

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Stan Douglas, “Television Spots” (selection), 1987-1988

silver print, videotape transferred to digital file (collection of Winnipeg Art Gallery, acquired with funds from the Winnipeg Art Gallery Foundation; photo by Lianed Marcoleta, courtesy WAG-Qaumajuq)

Vancouver’s Stan Douglas also upends expectations with Television Spots, videos that ran as brief, bewildering insertions into British Columbia television in the 1980s. These clips feel banal but also just a bit off, and would have confounded viewers trying to nail down what they were – TV drama, weird advertising, misfiring news interviews? 

Vancouver-based Ron Terada’s witty TL; DR also pulls off a conceptual bait-and-switch with big monochromatic paintings that take headlines from The Verge, a web-based technology media site, and then shift them into the typeface used by the New York Times. The results are catchy, context-free banners (“There’s a Secret Version of Tinder for Hot People and You Can’t Use It”) cloaked in the perceived seriousness and authority of a legacy publication. 

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Ron Terada, “TL; DR 2,” 2017-2018

acrylic on canvas, 26 paintings, 120" x 408" (courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver)

Finally, in a small corner room of the exhibition, three current 24-hour stations are playing non-stop. On a recent Friday evening that meant holiday movies, World Cup soccer and devastating footage of Russia’s latest attacks on Ukraine. A disorienting and uncomfortable melange of information, it is a good reminder why a show like Headlines is necessary. ■

Headlines: The Art of the News Cycle at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from Dec. 2, 2022, to May 21, 2023.

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