Artwork of the Week!

Artwork of the Week!
Week 12:

Eleanor Bond (born 1948)
Another Fallen Convertible
1980
Lithograph

After pursuing studies in interior design, English and comparative religion, Eleanor Bond completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Manitoba with a major in printmaking. Like her contemporary Wanda Koop, Bond is well-travelled and this has affected her art. Another Fallen Convertible is from a group of lithographs she produced shortly after she had spent time in places as disparate as Texas, India and the Columbian Icefields of the Canadian Rockies. Her prints of this period show small vehicles with no one behind the wheel amid treacherous mountain landscapes. Bond commented on this early series to Robert Enright:

“I think often when you’ve been traveling and you come back there’s a sense that nothing has changed. So this work was about not becoming complacent, about being on the road and taking chances. It was fairly metaphorical, not in a physical sense but in an intellectual and spiritual sense.” (Enright, “The Comfort of Edges”, 12)

From the mid-1980s until the present day, Bond has built her reputation as a painter of large urban landscapes that hover between utopian/hopeful and dystopian/hopeless visions of the future. Like Another Fallen Convertible, Bond’s paintings are depopulated but they show plentiful evidence of the human environment, thereby enabling individuals to project themselves into her scenes. And while the perspective Bond employed in Another Fallen Convertible seems disconcerting, the artist has become known for engaging viewers with even more dizzying aerial views.

Artwork of the Week!

Week 11:

Walter J. Phillips (1884-1963)
Grain Elevators
1939
Watercolour

Artist, teacher and writer Walter J. Phillips is recognized locally, nationally and internationally for his colour woodblock prints and watercolours. Mostly self-taught, Phillips was born in England and immigrated to Winnipeg in 1913. For several years, he was an instructor at St. John’s Technical High School and wrote a regular art column for the Winnipeg Tribune. In his own work, Phillips was able to adapt English watercolour techniques to the prairie landscape. His early Canadian images consist largely of scenes from Lake of the Woods, where he and his family rented a cottage each summer. Starting in 1926, Phillips traveled west and began painting the Rocky Mountains and the people and landscapes of the British Columbia coast.

A great deal of his work during the 1930s, however, also took inspiration from his wanderings around Manitoba. A much-loved subject was the grain elevator, upon which he commented in Duncan Campbell Scott’s 1947 monograph Walter J. Phillips:

“You can see an elevator ten miles away as you drive along a prairie road. We used to drive so much and over such uninteresting ground that elevators were glimpsed with joy. They stood up like beacons, and betokened a village, with gas or food or whatever our needs might be. I have a warm feeling for the elevator. Someone said that it expressed the only original architectural thought in the history of Canada.” (Scott, 26)

Phillips often identified the specific location of his elevator paintings and this image may in fact depict Headingly, Manitoba. Grain Elevators reflects the characteristic control and sensitivity with which Phillips handled his subjects and it was painted when the artist was in his prime; he had just been elected a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1933.

In 1941, Phillips moved to Calgary to teach at the Alberta Institute of Technology and Art. He later retired to Victoria, where he died, but he is most often recognized as a Winnipeg artist and his contribution to the development of the local scene was significant.

Artwork of the Week!

Week 10:

Winston Leathers (1932-2004)
Periodic Dynamic Field
1969
Silkscreen

Painter, printmaker, poet and professor Winston Leathers graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art in 1956 and studied art education in the late-1950s. A design instructor at Winnipeg’s Tech-Voc High School for ten years, Leathers joined the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in 1969, where he taught until his retirement in 1993.

Leathers experimented with new materials and techniques throughout his artistic career. An example of this is Periodic Dynamic Field which was included in the 2005 Gallery 1C03 and Gallery One One One joint exhibition Winston Leathers: In the Moment. Periodic Dynamic Field wdas one of the artist’s earliest images that used plastic as a printing medium and employed new fluorographic and metallic inks, causing parts of the work to glow under black light conditions. The hard edges, geometric shapes and bold colours of this print represent a shift from the compositions Leathers produced earlier in the decade. However, this work also incorporates painterly calligraphic markings that reflect the artist’s abiding interest in the teachings of Zen philosophy. In writing about a slightly later series of prints, Cosmic Variations, for which he is perhaps best known, Leathers explained the purpose behind his art: ‘As for my own work I hope to evoke a sense of wonder I see around me, not as a pictorial souvenir, nor as an equivalent of what I see, but as a personal statement of order and beauty.’ (Winston Leathers’ Cosmic Variations, unpaginated)

2010-2011 Programming

Check out our line-up for 2010-2011!

Dominique Rey: Pilgrims (September 9 - October 9, 2010)

Gerry Kopelow: Where The Buddha Walked (Gallery 1C03) AND Gerry Kopelow: Forty Years Ago Today (Hamilton Galleria & University of Winnipeg Archives) (October 21 - November 20, 2010)

Scott Stephens (January 20 - February 19, 2011)

Robert Kelly: Minutia (March 3 - April 2, 2011

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Gallery 1C03 presents
Dominique Rey: Pilgrims
September 9 - October 9, 2010

Performance by the Abzurbs: Thursday, September 9, 2:30 - 3:30 p.m.
(front lawn of The University of Winnipeg)

Opening reception: Thursday, September 9, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
(Gallery 1C03)

Public artist talk: Friday, September 17, 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
(Room 2C15, 2nd floor, Centennial Hall)


Dominique Rey, General Infinite Love, 2008, oil on canvas, 42" x 30" - Image courtesy of the artist

Throughout her artistic practice, Winnipegger Dominique Rey has been fascinated by representations of the other — a figure both real and imagined — and the ways this figure embodies our deepest fears, our suppressed longings and the infinite complexities of human life. Gallery 1C03 will present Pilgrims, a series of Rey's oil paintings and ink drawings that explore notions of the “unbeautiful” and how the unbeautiful becomes permissible, and even desirable, via performance and public display.

To accompany this exhibition and coincide with the festive atmosphere of The University of Winnipeg's Orientation Week, Gallery 1C03 and the University of Winnipeg Students Association will co-present a participatory performance by the Abzurbs, a collective of artists and musicians that merges burlesque, performance, music and visual art, evoking the grotesque through absurd and purposeless play. Dominique Rey is a founding member of the Abzurbs and their use of the mask and adoption of unconventional physical traits are vehicles of self-transformation which can be seen in Pilgrims.

Working in photography, video, painting and performance, Dominique Rey completed a BFA in painting at the University of Manitoba (1999), a MFA in photography in 2007 at Bard College (New York) and is currently pursuing a MFA in New Media via Berlin's Transart Institute. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Plug In ICA, Clark Gallery, Michael Gibson Gallery, Alternator Gallery, Gallery TPW, Truck Gallery, Gallery One One One and La Maison des artistes. Rey has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Ricard Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in the Globe & Mail, Frieze, Canadian Art, Border Crossings and the Winnipeg Free Press. In addition to her visual work, Dominique Rey's activities include performing with the Abzurbs, teaching, presenting lectures and curating. Rey was a member of the Board of Directors of Ace Art Inc. from 2002-2009, and a MAWA mentor in 2008/09 in collaboration with La Maison des artistes. She is presently Winnipeg's Visual Arts Ambassador for the duration of the city's designation as Cultural Capital of Canada in 2010.

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Gallery 1C03 presents
Gerry Kopelow: Where The Buddha Walked
October 21 - November 20, 2010

AND

Hamilton Galleria & University of Winnipeg Archives present
Gerry Kopelow: Forty Years Ago Today
October 21 - November 20, 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, October 21, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
(Gallery 1C03)

Public artist talk: Monday, October 25, 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
(Manitoba Boardroom, Room 2M70)

Salon Night: Thursday, October 28 at 7:30 p.m.
(Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, 121-100 Arthur Street)


Gerry Kopelow, Buddhist Shrine, Bohdgaya, India, 2006-07, digital image - Image courtesy of the artist


Gerry Kopelow, Niverville Participants, 1969/2010, digital image scanned from black and white silver negatives - Image courtesy of the artist

In a double solo exhibition on campus, The University of Winnipeg will present two distinct bodies of work created by Winnipeg photographer Gerry Kopelow. While Where The Buddha Walked and Forty Years Ago Today are different in subject matter and separated in time by four decades, they are connected as integral moments in Kopelow's artistic career. Forty Years Ago Today consists of black and white shots of Canadian youth culture from 1969-70, taking viewers back to the origins of Kopelow's photographic practice. Capturing spontaneous moments of the youth hippie scene of the day, the emerging photographer worked in the tradition of W. Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson. These images will be shown in the University's Hamilton Galleria and Archives, both located in the University's Library.

Kopelow's photographic pursuit of the “decisive moment” in the late-1960s indirectly led him to study Eastern meditational practices and, ultimately, the methods of mental cultivation invented and taught by the historical Buddha. For years, Kopelow has pursued the meditative life that he was introduced to by his meticulous approach to photography. In 2006 and 2007, Kopelow found himself travelling to India to visit historical sites associated with the life of the Buddha: the places where he is said to have been born, achieved his realizations, taught, meditated and died. The results of Kopelow's pilgrimmage are the subjects of the photographs in Where The Buddha Walked, which will be presented at Gallery 1C03.

Gerry Kopelow is an internationally published photographer, author and educator. As an emerging artist in the late-1960s, his photographic work received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Film Board of Canada. Kopelow subsequently established himself as an award winning commercial photographer, producing projects for various corporate, institutional and government clients. His writing and photographs have appeared in professional journals and his books on photography are widely respected as definitive works in the field. He has lectured and delivered workshops at various academic institutions including the University of Florida, The Georgia Institute of Technology, The Pratt Institute and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also teaches architectural photography regularly at the Cooper Union in New York. Kopelow's most recent publication is All Our Changes: Images from the Sixties Generation, Photographs by Gerry Kopelow (2009, University of Manitoba Press) and reproduces photographs that will be presented in Forty Years Ago Today. Where The Buddha Walked and Forty Years Ago Today are the first public solo presentations of Kopelow's non-commercial photography in nearly four decades.

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Gallery 1C03 presents
Scott Stephens
January 20 - February 19, 2011

Opening reception: Thursday, January 20 from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
(Gallery 1C03)

Public artist talk: Friday, January 21 from 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
(Room 2C14)


Scott Stephens, Unsacred #4, 2010, digital image - Image courtesy of the artist

Gallery 1C03 is proud to host Scott Stephens' first solo exhibition. Stephens will present new and recent digital images and a single channel video installation that draw, in part, upon research he conducted while studying at The University of Winnipeg. His exhibition will explore liminality through an investigation of the landscape and the Windigokan, a contrary figure in traditional Anishinabe society.

Operating on the fringe of traditional Anishinabe culture, the Windigokan represents the opposite of accepted norms. Stephens contends that, like clowns or misfits in other cultures, the Windigokan use their backwardness to teach others and that their contrary nature represents a powerful symbol that has received little attention to date, both within and outside of Anishinabe society. His landscape studies suggest the imagined physical space from which contrariness might originate and his depictions of material manifestations of the Windigokan will open discussion about this sacred society and the importance of deviant cultural figures. Stephens' show is co-presented as a satellite exhibition of Plug In ICA's Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, a large-scale exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art from around the world that serves as the banner project for Winnipeg's Cultural Capital of Canada 2010 Program.

Scott Stephens is an emerging Anishinabe artist based in Winnipeg who works in photography, printmaking and video, among other media. Stephens obtained a BA in Psychology and Religious Studies from The University of Winnipeg (2002) and has completed mentorships and workshops with Manitoba Printmakers Association (Martha Street Studio) and Aboriginal Film Training. In the past four years, Stephens has been awarded grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council for his artistic work. Although Stephens has taken part in several group exhibitions across Canada and in North Dakota, most notably in Subconscious City at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2008), this project represents his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. Later in 2011, work from Stephens' series of prints exploring inter-cultural conflict will be the focus of a second solo show at Martha Street Studio.

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Gallery 1C03 presents
Robert Kelly: Minutia
March 3 - April 2, 2011

Opening reception: Thursday, March 3 from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
(Gallery 1C03)

Public artist talk: Friday, March 4 from 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
(Room 2C14)

Artist workshop on “Bookworks in the Digital Age and Their Continued Relevance”: (Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts; date and time TBD)

Artist workshop on “The Book as Art” for The Writers Collective: location and time TBD


Robert Kelly, The Book of A (detail), 2004, hard cover book - Image courtesy of the artist

Calgary-based artist Robert Kelly will present Minutia at Gallery 1C03, a conceptual installation consisting of eleven books of concrete poetry displayed on lecterns arranged in a circular formation. The bookworks are based on the eleven words from the sentence fragment “the first time I heard the sound of a page turning.” The essence of this installation is that awareness of minutiae is fundamental to meaningfulness. Minutia demonstrates this by isolating and recontextualizing components from the English language to create an arena in which to explore meaning.

Robert Kelly is a conceptual artist and educator who works in various media that include painting, printmaking, installation and performance. Kelly teaches creativity theory and practice, studio art and design and curriculum theory and design for the faculties of art and education at the University of Calgary. The editor of two recent publications on creativity as a primary rationale for education, Kelly has delivered many lectures and workshops on the subject of creativity and educational practice and serves as a consultant for the new Fine Arts Curriculum Initiative for the Alberta Ministry of Education. Kelly has presented his art in solo and group exhibitions across Alberta and in British Columbia and Ontario. Since its initial presentation at the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, Minutia has also been shown at the Maltwood Gallery in Victoria and at the McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario. Minutia is Robert Kelly's first solo exhibition in Manitoba.

Gallery 1C03 gratefully acknowledges financial assistance from the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Regular Gallery Hours:
Monday - Friday, noon - 4 p.m.
Saturday: 1 - 4 p.m.
Closed Thanksgiving Day, Remembrance Day and Louis Riel Day.

Contact:
Jennifer Gibson
Curator, Gallery 1C03
The University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9
Ph: 204.786.9253
F: 204.774.4134
E: j.gibson@uwinnipeg.ca

Artwork of the Week!

Week 9:

Diana Thorneycroft (born 1956)
Self-portrait in Field of Dolls II
1989
Black and white silver print

Internationally recognized photographer Diana Thorneycroft obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art and subsequently studied at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a Master of Arts in Art. Until the late-1980s, Thorneycroft concentrated primarily on drawing and printmaking. Self-portrait in Field of Dolls II was one of the first successful photographs she produced. Shot with infrared film on a warm summer night in a friend’s yard in Winnipeg, the subject matter and theatricality of this piece is indicative of the direction that Thorneycroft’s photographs would take in the years ahead. From exhibitions Touching: The Self, in which this image was included, to The Body, its lesson and camouflage, the artist spent several years photographing her own body, examining issues of gender, identity, vulnerability, the subconscious and the grotesque. Thorneycroft has also worked with dolls in both her photographic practice and in her drawings for more than twenty years. Employing them as human surrogates, Thorneycroft not only laid down beside dolls, she has distorted and manipulated them to act as metaphors for pain and suffering. Technically beautiful, Thorneycroft’s images are always challenging and they often raise disturbing questions about our psyche.