Artwork of the Week!

Week 7:

Aganetha Dyck (born 1937)
Hive Blanket
1992
Honeybee Text on Canvas

A recent winner of the Manitoba Arts Council’s Award of Distinction and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Winnipeg born Aganetha Dyck began creating art when she was in her mid-30s and living with her family in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Dyck studied drawing, weaving, ceramics and other media with George Glenn and Margaret Van Walsem through the local Arts Centre. From the beginning, Dyck often worked three-dimensionally and she drew intuitively upon her domestic experiences as a mother and homemaker. During the 1970s and 1980s, Dyck shrank clothing, canned buttons and decorated cigarettes.

For nearly the last two decades, however, she has collaborated with bees to produce her art. Around 1989, Dyck began renting hives from local beekeepers so that she might place objects inside of them to see what the insects would do. Over the years, she has introduced sports equipment, shoes, glass, Barbie dolls, dresses, crocheted items, Braille plates, canvas and porcelain into the hives.

Of Hive Blanket, Dyck says:

The Hive Blanket series began in 1991 when I noticed the marks the bees created were not unlike ancient text and perhaps even similar to musical notes at times. The Hive Blanket is an ongoing series, going into its 17th year of research and production. The blankets vary in size from 16 by 16 inches to 10 feet long by 9 inches high; they include my drawings, text and honeybee marks of honeycomb. I draw with the bees on canvas by giving the bees honeybee pheromones. Pheromones are honeybee chemicals of communication which the honeybees use with each other and perhaps even with other living organisms. I personally like to think that includes humans. This method of pheromone communication was suggested by Dr. Mark Winston from Simon Fraser University. I use other scents discovered at perfume counters and in fields of wildflowers in my attempt to communicate with the bees. (Electronic mail communication with the artist, January 15, 2008)

Artwork of the Week!

Week 6:

Murray McKenzie (1927-2007)
Daniel Spence, Lonesome Trapper (102)
1997
Black and White Silver Print

Respected Métis photographer Murray McKenize built his reputation on his sensitive portraits of the people who live in northern Manitoba’s isolated communities. Born in Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, McKenzie spent most of his life in The Pas, Thompson and other parts of this province. He began using a camera as a teenager recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium. In 1951, he graduated from the New York Institute of Photography and his images have been widely published in sources as diverse as the Winnipeg Free Press and Time magazine. In Daniel Spence, Lonesome Trapper (102), McKenzie documents the regret and sadness expressed in the face of his subject, an elder from Nelson House who, at the age of 102, is no longer able to go out on the trapline.

Check out this photograph in the Disability Resource Centre in the basement of Graham Hall!

Artwork fo the Week!

Week 5:

Wanda Koop (born 1951)
The Mountain

1981
Acrylic on Paper

With over fifty solo exhibitions to her credit, celebrated Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop has shown her paintings and videos for more than three decades across Canada and internationally. In 1998 she founded Art City, a storefront art center that gives youth at risk the opportunity to work with contemporary visual artists. Koop has received numerous awards for her work, including an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The University of Winnipeg in 2002.

Koop's paintings often reflect her love of landscape and are usually influenced by her travels. In her art, she develops a visual language of signs and symbols that help her make sense of the work around her. Elements of the land are reduced to bold, iconic forms, as with the painting presented here. Koop is also a prolific artist who works constantly. In developing a series of images, she produces hundreds of small sketches and then builds up medium-sized studies of selected scenes. Finally, she paints the most powerful images that will work on a monumental scale to confront and engage viewers.

Painted outdoors near the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver, the Mountain was one of several preliminary works for a 12 foot by 14 foot painting shown in one of Koop's early solo exhibitions at the London Regional Art Gallery. The series from which this painting is derived also shares another characteristic found in many of Koop's works: her need to paint in order to calm her fears and sense of dread. Art critic Robert Enright wrote that this particular series of paintings enabled the artist to neutralize her fear of mountains 'by transforming them into stately, symmetrical objects.' (Enright, 'Thinking Big', 41)

Artwork of the Week!

Week 4:

Tony Tascona (1926-2006)
Autumn
1994
Silkscreen, 40/45
Gift of Tony Tascona and Doreen Millin

Educated at the Winnipeg School of Art and, subsequently, at the University of Manitoba School of Art, Tony Tascona is recognized nationally for his abstract paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. Among his many honours, Tascona was awarded a Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Winnipeg in 1994 and was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. Along with his contemporaries Winston Leathers and Bruce Head, Tascona led Winnipeg's modernist art scene.

Over the years, Tascona produced many prints and his folio, tellingly titled The Four Seasons, reflects the shift in his work that took place during the 1990s. In the last two decades of his artistic career, Tascona returned to softer colours, more delicate lines and organic themes. Art critic Alilson Gillmor has written about the quartet of silkscreen images:

"The Four Seasons print folio from 1994 takes on a traditional theme in art history and gives it a modernist twist, expressing the year not through peasants doing their seasonal tasks, but through colour and form..." (unpublished text, 1998)

Artwork of the Week!

Week 3:

Don Proch (born 1944)
Firefly
1978
Silkscreen, 9/75
Gift of Richard Nordrum and Family

Part of a folio of prints released by the Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop in 1978, Don Proch’s Firefly deals with the rural prairie landscape and its connection to technologies of the urban environment. Proch obtained Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Education degrees from the University of Manitoba in 1966. He rose to fame in the early-1970s with the creation of unique sculptural drawings that he produced collaboratively with members of the Opthalmia Company, based out of his hometown Inglis, Manitoba near the Asessippi Valley. His early silkscreens, also printed by the Screen Shop, employed graphite powder and bronzing varnish to simulate delicate drawings or dry-point etchings, an effect that can be seen here in the building blocks that constitute the landscape.

Check out this artwork in the second floor hallway of the Bryce building!

Artwork of the Week!

Week 2:

Daphne Odjig (born 1919)
Nanabajou and his Daughter
1975
Silkscreen, 4/60
Gift of Frank and Sue Hechter

An Ojibwe of the Potawatomi Nation, Daphne Odjig was born and raised on the Wikwemikong First Nation of Manitoulin Island, Ontario. From 1963 until 1976, she lived and worked in northern Manitoba and in Winnipeg. An accomplished artist in her own right, Odjig has done much to promote recognition of contemporary First Nations art across the country and internationally: in 1970 she founded Indian Prints of Canada to market reproductions of Aboriginal art and, in 1974, she opened the Warehouse Gallery (now known as the Wah-Sa Gallery) to exhibit the work of First Nations artists. In 1973 Odjig, along with fellow artists Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray and Joseph Sanchez, founded Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporated (popularly referred to as the ‘Indian Group of Seven’) to support one another’s artistic careers, establish sources of funding for other artists and inspire younger generations to celebrate ‘being Indian’.

Nanabajou and his daughter is a silkscreen print based on an original painting of the same title that was used to illustrate a traditional Aboriginal story in the publication Tales from the Smokehouse. According to the legend, Nanabajou was capable of transforming into any living creature. He used his supernatural abilities to fulfill his lustful desires toward his eldest daughter and seduced her by posing first as a caterpillar, then as a rabbit and, finally as a handsome young stranger. The solid colours and strong geometric shapes of this image recall Picasso’s Cubism, a style that Odjig admired. Although Nanabajou and his daughter references erotic subject matter, as signified by the emphasis on the young woman’s breasts and the embracing limbs, the general structure of the composition also resembles a Pieta, with the daughter’s tilted head and serene posture conjuring up that of the Madonna.

Check out this artwork during events in Convocation Hall in Wesley Hall!

Artwork of the Week!

This summer, Gallery 1C03 presents Artwork of the Week!, a weekly selection designed to acquaint our online audience with holdings from The University of Winnipeg’s Art Collection.

Artwork of the Week!
Week 1:

H. Eric Bergman (1893-1958)
Dusk
Undated
Colour woodcut, 10/100
Gift of H. E. J. Bergman

Dusk (alternately titled After Dusk) is one of two colour woodcut prints created by Bergman in The University of Winnipeg Art Collection. Though it is undated, Dusk was likely completed in the late-1920s or early-1930s and it depicts the Lake of the Woods area, a favourite theme for this artist.

Bergman was best known for his wood engravings, which he began to create in 1926 and have been exhibited internationally. During the following three decades, Bergman printed nearly 100 different images, mainly of botanicals and landscapes. Regardless of subject, all of Bergman’s wood engravings reveal his keen sense of observation and exquisite attention to detail, planning and proportion. He was indeed a master of this medium.

Check out this artwork on display in Gallery 1C03 until the end of this week!