Winnipeg Stages Public Art

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Making contemporary art accessible to large public audiences is always challenging. Work by artists in contemporary galleries may leave viewers feeling ignorant, separated from histories they do not know and unsure how to read complex work. “The meaning of contemporary art isn’t supposed to reveal itself immediately,” says Jenifer Papararo, the executive director of Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. “Sometimes, that’s just too great a deterrent.”

Luckily, galleries are finding ways to bring high-calibre contemporary art to audiences in more approachable ways. The latest example is Stages: Drawing the Curtain, which runs Aug. 18 to Sept. 4 in various venues around Winnipeg. Plug In invited nine artists – Winnipeg’s Erica Eyres and Divya Mehra, Vancouver’s Ron Tran and Krista Belle Stewart, and Toronto’s Abbas Akhavan and Kara Hamilton, as well as three international artists – to create sculptures and performances that bring new life and meanings to public sites, from parks to empty buildings. The aim, as the event’s title suggests, is to consider the stage – “its function as a platform, its meaning as a point of attention and its physical design.” Featuring everything from an eight-foot-high illuminated Om sign hauled around town by flatbed truck to performances by drag queens and a vibrantly painted urban tunnel, Stages allows happenstance encounters, but also offers guided tours, promising two different but engaging experiences.

In putting together the project, Paraparo was interested in bringing sculpture and performance together to explore “how they are similar or slightly different.” Her curatorial process was guided by a need to find art that would work well outside the white walls of the gallery space. “I looked at artists who I know do that well, and who have experience in public space,” she says.

Downtown Winnipeg’s Bonnycastle Park will be home to two unrelated works by Akhavan and Hamilton. Harnessing the glitter-power of the local drag scene, Akhavan’s Variations on a Monument will see sunset performances by a rotating cast of queens, delivered by limousine to a fountain platform that once served as the base for a monument.

Meanwhile, Hamilton’s interactive sculpture, Curtain Wall, uses other local resources in both construction and concept – viewers can peer at the Assiniboine River through two slits carved in a block of Tyndall stone, a cream-coloured locally quarried limestone used in many Winnipeg buildings, from homes to the provincial legislature.

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Kara Hamilton, "Curtain Wall," 2017, Tyndall stone, installation view, photograph courtesy of the artist

Kara Hamilton, "Curtain Wall," 2017, Tyndall stone, installation view, photograph courtesy of the artist

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Kara Hamilton, "Curtain Wall," 2017

Kara Hamilton, "Curtain Wall," 2017

Tyndall stone, installation view, photograph courtesy of the artist

Tran dug deep into Winnipeg’s history and visual culture for his work at the Forks National Historic Site. He considers Westview Park, a popular hiking and sledding spot in the city’s west end, colloquially known as Garbage Hill because it was built on an old landfill site. His sculptures of collaged items and vintage advertisements will poke out of the ground, almost as if they are growing.

Other works approach internal public spaces with a similar degree of conceptual disruption. Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero explores vibrant colour using landscape and architecture as reference points for a site-specific painting on the floor of a tunnel that connects Winnipeg’s city hall to the Centennial Concert Hall.

Another international artist, Britain’s Pablo Bronstein, connects architecture and notions of the body, exploring space via choreographed movement by a group of dancers at Fort Garry Place.

The work of Winnipeg-born Eyres, now based in Glasgow, is always an unexpected and jarring delight. Curiosity and the grotesque are at the centre of Head, a giant inflated nylon head that will smash against the window of a soon-to-be demolished mini-mart on Corydon Avenue. Mehra, a finalist for the 2017 Sobey Art Award, is no stranger to works that break the boundaries of traditional art spaces. Her glowing Om symbol will carve a radical cartography as it moves through the city on a flatbed truck.

The abandoned floors of the Hudson’s Bay building have long called out for an art-world intervention. Using sound and story, Krista Belle Stewart, a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, inserts a new oral history into the colonizing corporation with the help of recordings of her grandmother’s musical group, the Potato Gardens Band. Norwegian artist Toril Johannessen will use part of the same building for her multi-channel audio drama, which explores the future of vision. The piece will also be broadcast on CKUW, the on-campus FM radio station at the University of Winnipeg.

While these works are temporal in nature, Plug In intends this initial Stages to be the start of a larger ongoing public experience. With plans to continue every two years, Stages aims to build excitement and new understandings for Winnipeggers about the possibilities of contemporary art.

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art

460 Portage Ave, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 0E8

204-942-1043

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