Critical Distance Vol 13:1

September 14 – October 13, 2007
The Winnipeg Trash Museum
Frieso Boning

Toward an Institution of Oblivion
A response by Kendra Ballingall

The Winnipeg Trash Museum will be the largest and perhaps only museum of trash in the world! Museum highlights include samples from the scavenged comb and glove collections as well as the founders’ own patinated trash collection; a gallery of art featuring found-object works by Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell and Brian Jungen; and CAD models of each proposed Museum design and possible location, such as a hub cap/tuna can-inspired metallic heap of hope at the Forks site adjacent to the Goldeye’s baseball stadium, where the Museum’s peak would join hands with the Esplanade Riel, the revolving restaurant, and the Golden Boy, forming the city’s architectural crown. The gift shop offers an assortment of much-coveted items, including a unique hardcover coffee table book with glossy, full-colour images of the landfills of Manitoba, and WTM t-shirts in six elegant designs.

Critical Distance Vol 12:5

Roewan Crowe
digShift
June 22 – August 4, 2007

Excavation as Transmutation: Roewan Crowe’s digShift
A Response By Heather Milne

Dig (verb): the act of unearthing layers to reach something concealed beneath the surface. Dig (noun): an event during which one unearths fragments in an attempt to piece together an understanding of the past.

Shift (verb): a change or reversal, to move from one place to another; to undergo transmutation. Shift (noun): a movement to do something; an expedient, an ingenious device for affecting some purpose; the length of time during which a person works.

The play of images and words in Roewan Crowe’s digShift, reveals how the act of digging creates a transmutation that is both a process and an object. In this compelling, moving, and strangely eerie installation, Crowe stages the work of unearthing. The abandoned gas station and its environs function as an affective geography, a landscape of emotion into which the artist digs in order to come to terms with the past.

Critical Distance Vol 12:4

Melanie Authier’s Karma Kanyon
April 27 – May 25, 2007

There are those daydreams that everyone has. Those slips in and out of reality that are hard to describe but impossible to forget. They are creations of the deep recesses of ones imagination. They are sometimes figments of reality, but quite frequently these small escapes take one away from the real and into their own world. One is permitted to craft their own interpretations and stories. Melanie Authier’s Karma Kanyon is much like these experiences in the work’s ability to recreate and reinvent realities that are unique to every viewer.

Critical Distance Vol 12:2

Donigan Cumming: Episodic
January 12 – February 24, 2007

A response by J.J. Kegan McFadden
“… you could tell me a story about something that has upset you a lot. Just try & remember it.” ¹
a response to Donigan Cumming: Episodic

October 27 – December 9, 2006

Haraldur Jónsson and Steingrímur Eyfjörð
Curated/ Organised by Hannes Lárusson and Birna Bjarnadóttir

Opening Friday, October 27 @ 7:30pm
Artist talk by Haraldur Jónsson: Saturday, 28 October, 2pm

Exhibition sponsored by: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Iceland, Department of Icelandic Language and Literature, Páll Guðmundsson Memorial Scholarship, University of Manitoba.

Haraldur Jónsson: The Gap, the Wound
There are those who view art as being separated from reality and artists as the true exiles. However, in the case of Haraldur Jónsson’s artwork, one could make the opposite observation,
viewing art as reality, or as the medium that brings about the only possible reflections of reality. Far from in exile, the artist is here and now, his perception being of a moonlike quality, stimulating the ebb and flow of the countless reflections of reality, as if reality itself gravitates towards this human attribute. Thereby, one would not wish to disregard the human condition. Reality is hard to grasp, in particular the one that can only be perceived from within, or the reality of inner experiences.

Critical Distance Vol. 12:1
Self-Serve at La Pagode Royale: by Shelly Low
October 13 – November 18, 2006

A response by Iris Yudai

From the hippest eatery to the most formulaic fast-food joint, every restaurant begins as an imagined space. Before the building, the chef, the menu, or the customers – first comes the concept. The restauranteur starts by creating an imaginary business to satisfy an imaginary customer. Artist Shelly Low is intrigued by restaurants both real and imagined, and in Self-Serve at La Pagode Royale, she has created her own kind of meta-restaurant.

Critical Distance Vol. 11:5
No One Helped Me: Daniel Barrow
June 16 – July 30, 2006

A response by Steven Matijcio

Daniel Barrow’s No One Helped Me is a cross-disciplinary collage that lays its pieces bare to emphasize their congregation; playfully animating elements of painting, drawing, cut paper, sculpture and written narrative via the vehicles of video, projection, and performance. The look and feel of the ensuing constellation recalls early 20th century magic lantern shows, comic strips, and serial novels with yellowed stock and pastel colours crossing the patina of time with the pathos of nostalgia. These individual parts assume collective life through what Barrow has variously titled “graphic performance,” “live illustration,” and (perhaps most fittingly) “manual animation” – marrying actions of the eye and hand as he manipulates drawings on mylar transparencies across the screen of an overhead projector. The ensuing process accentuates the elements of storyboarding and cinematic perspective habitually present in Barrow’s hybrid collages, bending fantasy and reality in a maze of floating body parts and enigmatic gestures evocative of the avant-garde Surrealist movement. This latter comparison is especially telling in the context of No One Helped Me (and its sister performance Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry), where Surrealist staples such as the dream world, the unconscious, and the search for layers beyond our immediate reality are conjured through the lens of Barrow’s quasi-biographical storytelling. Another Surrealist symbol functions as the iconic purveyor of this passage as the human eye takes on a recurring role; undergoing antibiotic treatment, cosmetic mishaps, prosthetic enhancement, tears (and tears), unrequited gazes and various other trauma that turns the vision of both artist and audience increasingly inward. Here, in the liminal territory of the mind’s eye, Surrealist architect André Breton’s hinted at the eye’s perceptual capacity when writing, “The eye exists in an untamed state. It presides over the conventional exchange of signals apparently required by the navigation of the mind.” In a similar space of semiotic ambiguity – between visions inside and outside a conscious state – Barrow launches his waking dream.

Critical Distance Vol 11:4

mentis prehensio
Sarah Crawley
March 10 – April 22, 2006

Luminous Gestures of Intimacy: The Photographs of Sarah Crawley
A Response By Roewan Crowe

In her recent work entitled, mentis prehensio, artist Sarah Crawley returns to the physicality of the body as her source of image-making. She uses her own body in this work, as well as her lover’s to create abstract photographic images that engulf us in luminous colour. These images are predominantly variations of red, with some black, and their intensity radiates heat to the outer edges of the gallery. The 13 photographs are satisfyingly large (50” X 65”). They are not framed, rather they are applied directly to the walls of the gallery, grafting a photographic skin onto the space. These sensuous, saturated skins appear to be lit from behind, creating an illuminated vellum manuscript of sorts. It is a glowing story about artistic invention, the abstracted body and a persistent desire for intimacy.

Critical Distance VOL 11:3
Brian Flynn
Cover Series: Belfast Portraits
January 20-February 25, 2006
I love Ireland and Ireland loves me
A response by Kendra Ballingall

It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. ¹

In the age of the information bomb, a call to arms is a call to represent. Every medium — video, photography, pen and ink — is heavily coded, burdened by its complicity in the competing dialogues of the military-information complex, in propaganda, advertising, newspaper illustration. What medium is at the disposal of the contemporary visual artist? Must it be vestigial, outside, excess? Industrial detritus? Ruins or remains?

Critical Distance Vol 11:2

Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon
Between Sounds and Abstractions
October 14, to November 12, 2005

BETWEEN SOUNDS AND ABSTRACTIONS
A Response by Deanna Radford

Between our commonly shared understanding of every-day household objects as they are physically and culturally constructed, and, the manipulation of these objects, their meanings, and capabilities, lies Between Sounds and Abstractions. Comprised of two playful and sensitive kinetic sculptures or objets sonore¹, The Voice of Things and Au bout du fil were created by Montreal artists Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon and were on exhibit at aceartinc. from October 14, to November 12, 2005.

Critical Distance Vol 11:1

Daniel Laskarin, Teresa Ascencao, Adad Hannah
to be continued…
August 16, to October 13, 2005

to be continued… The Real Made Ubiquitous
A Response By Steve Loft

The American public is now really a spectatorship. Grizzly, loud, lewd and stupid is the way of mass television…Now please, let’s have no more pieties about school safety, gun control, road rage and all the fab topics of superficial concern. When the great broadcasting medium of a super state clawing for a few more millions is willing to vulgarize the population for one more ratings point with less shame than Tom Green eyeing the hind quarters of a dead moose, cease the pieties. (1)

martin beauregard : maclean
28 May – June 30, 2005

A response by Christabel Wiebe

Most of us are at least somewhat acquainted with the experience of failure. You know, when you give something a go and it just doesn’t work out. Sometimes you’ve given it your best shot, and sometimes it was just a half-hearted attempt to begin with. But the end result is the same: a flop. At its most excruciating, it is played out in a highly visible manner, in front of others, with a lot of attendant noise and flashing lights or (worse) media attention and documentation of the pitiful act that transpires. This is often referred to as “spectacular failure,” borne of the philosophy “go big or go home.”

P.S.: The University of Manitoba Students of Fine Art Annual Juried Show
April 30 – May 14, 2005

a response by Gwen Armstrong

“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.”

A traditional view of student art might contemplate its potential, an artistic appreciation enhanced perhaps by the stir of discovery. Between dismissal and acclaim, critical response remains a highly present constituent in the realm of art-making.

But consider the curious role of the student artist – to create work that is fresh and authentic in response to assignments whose evaluation may impact heavily upon the artist’s creative, educational and economic future. Art school seeks to straddle an unnavigable dichotomy of structure and freedom. The womb, no matter how nurturing, is still a container.

confetti : warped: by Karen Azoulay and Robyn Foster
March 5 – April 16, 2005

A response by Cam Bush

Abjection in art is nothing new — or certainly it shouldn’t be to anyone who has been paying even the most cursory attention. To both artists and viewers alike, the banal-as-beautiful has become a (wearyingly) familiar trope for the would-be iconoclast. What once was aesthetically revolutionary has itself oftentimes become banal: the easily caricatured clichÈs of the artiste auteur; the sort of stuff people “don’t get’. The proliferation of this sort of coolly self-reflexive work is not surprising. Compelled toward the deconstruction of, well, something, but still beholden to a largely modernist aesthetic ethos, many artists are left suspended in a void between ‘pretty’ and ‘pretty clever’, with opportunities for investment and transformation relegated to the sidelines or simply forgotten. Alienation is sometimes said to be The Point of such work, which seems both faÁile and, well, sort of beside the point. Where is the viewer left to go but ‘nowhere’ when all the alternatives seem to have been exhausted?

spoke: Linda Duvall  and Sandee Moore
January 8 – February 19, 2005

A response by Jeanne Randolph

Erskine drank tea with me.  We were in a luscious flow of spirits and vastly merry.  “How we do chase a thought,” said Erskine, “when once it is started.  Let run as it pleases over hill and dale and take numberless windings, still we are at it.  It has a greyhound at its heels every turn.”

3 objects: Daniel Young and Christian Giroux
October 16 – November 13, 2004

a response by Kenneth Hayes

Insofar it is possible to say anything in general about contemporary sculptural practice as such, one could identify a present tendency to exploit ever more varied, pre-fabricated, and perishable materials, and say that strategies of dispersion and willful assemblage hold the field. Radical heterogeneity is now the norm. Of course this applies mostly to those works made and presented indoors, which are generally described as sculpture-installation. The other dominant strategy for ambitious sculpture is to assume the form of a pavilion, and with it the full range of social, spatial, and tectonic issues that were once the exclusive concern of architects and building. The great novelty of these works is that they can be entered and experienced from inside. Of course, these works are mostly situated outdoors, in the city or in some park-like setting, and despite their large scale, they are often temporary. With these enlarged means, sculpture takes up once again the classic Modernist role of advancing alternative models of the public and social. It also assumes – presumably unintentionally – much of architecture’s relentlessly ameliorative character, to the point of becoming a form of sophisticated play, even an object of entertainment.

Too Sweet! Go Away!: by Helen Cho
August 28 – October 2, 2004

A response by Doug Lewis

Helen Cho’s exhibition Too Sweet, Go Away! is an installation not to be so easily assumed. It reveals both a simple grace as well as several haptic complexities. In this body of work, Cho appears interested in connections; what they are and how they may be entwined are not left solely up to interpretation (as is everything), but are turned-over to our morays of social engagement. In the exhibition’s entirety, this installation consists of soap-bars (more bars than one should count), as well as over 800 lbs. of white granulated sugar… (poured directly onto the floor), and to the other side of the gallery, two monitors playing single channel videos, (both quite independent of one another).

UNDONE: Mariela Borello
April 3 – May 1, 2004

a response to the exhibition by Susan Turner

What I experienced first was colour: gorgeous, bright, strong, optimistic, brash. Cadmium yellow deep, raspberry candy-floss, the palest of pale red, the ambiguity of white on white. And then shape: conch, whorl, target, and that large round ball of coils. And finally texture as I extended my hand outward to touch: silky, delicate, and then rubbery, malleable, and clammy.

101 Talismans for a Happy Death: Joseph Conlon
February 20 – March 20, 2004

a response to the exhibition by Sandee Moore

The commonly held ideal for a “happy death” would be one without pain – a swift death without suffering, or a quiet passing surrounded by loved ones. Catholics believe that a happy death means becoming one with God at the moment of death. Timothy Leary wrote a book on the subject while he was terminally ill; in Designing Death, he proposes that a happy death is simply a matter of choosing the situation you will die in. Similarly, in his novel A Happy Death, Camus espouses a “will to happiness” as the means to a happy life and death. To not be alone is artist Joe Conlon’s idea of a happy death. It is also the impetus for his photo and video installation 101 Talismans for a Happy Death. To not be alone is not only to approach death with loved ones nearby, but also to recognize the universality of death – that everyone dies or is dying.

I’m Only Happy When it Rains, and 20 or 30 other clichéd things I hate about myself: Les Newman¹
January 9 – February 7, 2004

a response to the exhibition by Valery Camarta

THE SCENE: The smoking room in a studio next door to aceartinc. gallery.

act one: FUN AND GAMES

Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?): David Garneau
September 5 – october 4, 2003
a response to the exhibition by Cathy Mattes

The recent work of David Garneau prods reflection about the phases Métis people may go through when coming to terms with cultural identity. These stages usually result with intense memory overload, as people consider negative or positive personal experiences, and Métis history. This may seem superfluous to some, but it is actually a mode of cultural survival. I believe that for many Métis the experiences of being recognized and recognizing, being and becoming is internalized, and effects how we view ourselves. I would argue that it is embedded in the struggles of our relations, ourselves, government legislation, and being of mixed ancestry. It also comes from the general lack of acknowledgement among Métis people of our experiences, contributions, and in the confusion about who, and what, we exactly are. We are whole – a whole nation, whole families, whole individuals, yet sometimes, it seems that we are treated, or recognized as only being half. It is these things that David Garneau’s work brings to the surface for me.

The Decor Project: White on White: Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens
June 7 – July 5, 2003

a response to the exhibition by Risa Horowitz

It is an odd experience, inviting visitors to my home. When the visit is over, I sometimes find myself wandering through the space wondering how it might appear to an outsider, being accustomed as I am to myself and my ways and unaccustomed as I am to newcomer socializing. This experience has been turned on its head by Hadley and Maxwell’s takeover of my dining room, the necessary prelude to their gallery exhibition The Décor Project: White on White.

Supplies: Jennifer Stillwell
April 12 – May 10, 2003

a response to the exhibition by Doug Lewis

It’s been a somewhat difficult beginning – trying to put pen to paper and write some intelligent thoughts on Jennifer Stillwell’s new work…which I have yet to see. Her most recent installation at aceartinc., entitled Supplies, 2002/2003, has remained ellusive up and untill the opening. The reason is due in part to how Jennifer makes artwork. Her process is one of situation, beginning with efforts grounded in the practice of neo-reductionist methods and followed up with a combination of stubbornness, grit and the sheer action of doing. Jennifer Stillwell prefers the challenge of the site-specific installation (that can be an artform in and of itself). As site specific installations go, each, of course, is different from the next and most certainly differing from the last. After considering various possibilities, I thought that my response to Supplies had to somehow reflect the kind of effort and respect to method that Jennifer puts into her work.

Machination: by Jo-Anne Balcaen
April 12 – May 10, 2003

a response to the exhibition by Daniel Barrow

Jo-Anne Balcaen’s installation begins in the tawny, wood-paneled stairwell of 280 McDermot. It’s an attractive space with high ceilings and a noble, oversized banister. It has become a point of character at aceartinc., and has attracted other installations in the past. In “Machination”, Balcaen shrewdly uses this space to preface the body of her installation which waits at the top of the stairs.

Scale: Erika Lincoln
February 1 – March 1, 2003

a response to the exhibition by Reva Stone

Perception = awareness, discernment, observations, reading (view, opinion, picture, slant, assessment, experience
(knowledge, occurrence, feel))

How do we represent this fundamentally participatory mode of experience?

We become aware of thinking only in those kinesthetic moments when we actively bind the sights, savors, sounds, tastes and textures swirling around us to our inmost, feeling flesh.¹

L’Invention des animaux: Jocelyn Robert
October 19 – November 9, 2002

a response to the exhibition by mariianne mays

An aeroplane in the sky, a white silhouette in the wide open blue, moving, distorted, relaxed again, pulled out of shape again. Accompanied by high, piping noises, not disagreeable, more like some cute little animal, coming and going. The invention of animals? What kind of a title is this, much too heavy with content for such a light-spirited work.

- from transmediale go public! exhibition, on-line catalogue

It’s human habit that leans us to metaphor, and comfort; and Jocelyn Robert teases this practice with L’Invention des animaux. Robert’s ingenuous installation — the whimsical, erratic image of a plane projected onto a large video screen, the “cute” blips and bleets, chirps and ambient noise traffic of the accompanying audio piece — calls to mind childhood summer afternoons. Lying on your back, staring up at the clouds in the wide, blue sky, who hasn’t brought other shapes and creatures to life by a dreamy slip of the eye, a quick and simple imaginary equation? There is more than one way to make up animals, to bring imaginary beings to life. Rather than invoke metaphor, L’Invention des animaux proposes another model: daydreaming.

Unexpected Encounters: Micheline Durocher, Christine Horeau, Marie-Christine Simard, Cydra MacDowall, Gail Bourgeois
September 14 – October 12, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Susan Turner

Gail Bourgeois began her ongoing curatorial research in 1999 while living and teaching in Montreal. The following year she produced found image with my history, a charcoal drawn diptych of an isolated house with no windows or doors, and paired it with a bulb and its root tendrils meandering below the surface. For her this drawing was profoundly disturbing and seemed emblematic both of an understanding she’d reached about her family relationships as well as about the gap between the binaries we ascribe to our understanding of our relation to the world. It was the catalyst to question what other artists might do with the same themes that interested her: “ruptures and the ordered flow of existence caused by a breakdown in expectations;” “the difficulty of human communication;” and the “urge to make a home or to nest.” After several studio visits, she selected the work of Montreal artists Micheline Durocher, Christina Horeau, and Marie-Christine Simard, and Cyndra MacDowell from Toronto. The exhibition was first seen at Women’s Art Resource Centre in Toronto. For the Winnipeg showing, the work of Helene Dyck was added. The exhibition will also travel to AKA in Saskatoon and will there add Monika Napier, from Saskatoon, and then to the Richmond Art Gallery, and will pick up a Vancouver artist as yet to be selected.

Grocery Store: Live in the Exchange!: The Co-Op Collective (dempsey / millan / zab / moore)
August 9 – August 31, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Christopher Olson

When I was a child, I would accompany my father selling his prints and paintings in Old Market Square. Our table was set up next to folks selling everything from produce to used books, and to pass the time I made crayon and water-colour pictures that I would sell for a dollar. I guess you could say my art career began early.

As did my love affair with the Exchange. During my teen years I spent Saturdays Zen-navigating the streets, digging for treasure in used bookstores, taking pictures of graffiti in the alleys (”Wpg HELL” was a favourite) and spending my evenings at Emma G’s when I wasn’t going to punk shows at the Cauldron and the Albert.

WEATHERVANE II: Curated by Marian Butler
July 18 – July 28, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Allisa York

Weather. It’s only natural that the word should present itself first in the role of noun — it surrounds and affects us constantly, after all. In the process of responding to part two of the Weather Vane project, however, I found myself dwelling on the idea of weather as verb. “To expose to or affect by atmospheric changes.” Or, even more compelling, “to come safely through, to survive.” Life marks us. Learning to speak Italian (or Cantonese, or Swahili) forges new synaptic pathways, lines of language laid indelible on the brain. A broken heart can knit like a bone but will remain forever vulnerable along the seam. Bodies record (and often recount) the essential narratives of life — foreheads creased in fury or in thought, shoulders rounded in shame, hymens torn, bellies stretched until they stripe. “Look,” a woman might say, touching a fingertip to her thigh, tracing a smattering of glassy scars, “here’s where I hit a gravel patch and felt my first bicycle betray me. I remember, I bit my lips while my dad pressed tweezers into my flesh and plucked out every stone.”

The Face of Everything: Daniel Barrow
July 18 – July 28, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Robert Enright

Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow is a latter-day romantic who is conducting an ongoing inquiry into the nature and conditions of the romantic sensibility. In Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors (2001) he used his special form of animated drawing to present a portrait of the would-be artist as a young man-about-town, discovering the contours of urban life and of his blossoming sexuality. It was a charming annunciation – coming on while coming out – and in both technique and content it held out considerable promise.

Climate Control: Ken Gregory
July 18 – July 29, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Hope Peterson

This is… this is… this is…

The ping of existence, sounding gently, is at the core of Ken Gregory’s latest work Climate Control – or How to Predict the Weather with a Pig Spleen. How can a machine affirm Life? Not ease, enhance or document life, but profoundly confirm the existence of all living matter. Not sentience, but that throbbing, base, survival-mad life we all clutch so close, defend and risk for the unknowing joy of it. I can’t entertain here the personification of any built object – this is of course human nonsense and the wishing of a child. And artificial intelligence as we currently understand it does not enter into the artist’s goals. Despite my resistance to anthropomorphic comparisons, with a sudden vision of reproductive technology inverted I dream the following non-theory: if the inventor transposes his body, his lived experience, into his mechanical product, it will mirror the joy of creation. For an artist working at a high level of technological interrogation, there results a most unique byproduct: the warm machine.

The New Myth: Wendy Wersch
June 13 – July 6, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Bev Pike

Grace, my thousand-year old cat, is snoozing peacefully next to me as I write. She is dying, dear Reader. I watch her deteriorate hourly, and worry over her coping with her difficulties. All I can do is give her love and try to alleviate her troubles a little. It helps us to try to engage with the character that used to live inside her body as she is fading away.

sno-screen: Various Artists
February 23, 2002

a project of aceartinc. and the National Screen Institute held in Old Market Square including work by U of M video students

a response to the exhibition by Alex Poruchnyk

It all seemed to start when jake moore saw Heaven, a co-production by Jack Lauder and Lloyd Brandson, at a Video Pool First Video Fund meeting held one snowy night. In Lauder and Brandson’s video, two people walk off across the lake on a frozen winter day wearing only the barest of necessities. Eventually, they disappear on the horizon.

Polish: Mary Kavanagh
February 22 – March 23, 2002
a response to the exhibition by Alison Gillmor

You see a long, narrow table draped in white linen and heaped with silver. Hundreds and hundreds of cups, plates, trays, vases, knives, spoons. At one end of the table a woman is seated, patiently polishing a dish with a small white cloth. For four hours a day for the duration of the show, this is what she does: she chooses one tarnished object from the table, takes one clean cloth from a pile on a nearby wooden cabinet, and she polishes. When she is finished polishing, the woman removes a small, hand-written identifying tag from the object and pins it to the cloth. The object, now gleaming and free of tarnish, is replaced on the table; the cloth, now mussed and marked, is placed on another pile on the cabinet. This process is videotaped.

Lucky Rabbit: Holly Newman
February 22 – March 23, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Heidi Eigenkind

Imagine being a child. A favourite adult takes you to a store. In the store there is room in which 200 objects are on display. The adult says, “You can choose any one of these and take it home.” All of them are lovely, although each of them is lovely in its own way. Some have tags hanging from them. On the tags, other visitors, both adults and children, have written stories. You can write a story too, if you want, at a small desk on which blank tags and pencils wait. Imagine: all that excitement and pleasure. All that tension: which one to choose.

Song for the First Born: Karen Hoeberg
January 18 – February 16, 2002

a response to the exhibition by Shawna Beharry

I often wonder what it means to invite or place “prayer” within a gallery.

What is appropriate for an artist to ask of others?

Crows: an aceart bookwork including the works of Marian Butler, April Hickox, Joanne Bristol, Karilee Fuglem, Sheila Spence, Susan Mills, Dagmar Dahle, Candace Savage
December 16, 2001

a response to the exhibition  by Jen Loewen

I find myself thinking about crow.

Crow weaves its way in and out of the world. Making its place, it meanders between not-quite-welcome and outcast. A carrion bird who likes to play with shiny objects. It sees opportunity when others would only see death and collects insignificance for reasons only it can know. Crow builds its life, moment to moment, around that which is present. This is its energy.

Weather Vane: curated by Marian Butler
December 12 – December 15, 2001

a response to the exhibition by Alissa York

“What’s it like out?” we ask. And, literally speaking, the weather is just that — out, the prevailing conditions beyond our bodies (and our buildings, those bodily extensions within which we dwell).

But we all know there’s more to it than that.

send + receive festival of sound [004]: Steve Heimbecker, Diane Landry and CinDy
October 16 – October 20, 2001
a response to the exhibition by Steve Bates

There are always challenges associated with hosting send + receive, although 2001 was particularly acute. Having just emerged from the chaos and turmoil of September 11 and its dramatic and far-reaching repercussions, send + receive

Much of the activity around last year’s festival was hosted by ace teetered on the edge of cancellation.artinc. and included, among others, Québécois artist Diane Landry. Landry’s sensitive, playful and poetic work was exhibited earlier in the month as part of Québéque ! New York. Held in New York City and featuring the work of numerous Québécois artists, this group exhibition was located in various galleries around what became known as Ground Zero. The piece Landry was originally scheduled to install during send + receive lay silent under a coating of dust, residue from the Trade Tower collapse.

École d’Aviation / Flying School: Diane Landry
October 14 – November 10, 2001

a response to the exhibition by Rodney LaTourelle

A kind of trance is induced as soon as one hears the faint whistling and begins to sense the slow, sure motions of Diane Landry’s installation, &Eacutecole d’aviation (Flying School). If you are trying to quit smoking, it may be hard to bear.

how are things? Stairwell Installation Project #3: Michael Dumontier and Tom Elliott
March 23 – April 21, 2001

a response to the exhibition by Kevin Matthews

Between the world that is and anything else is imagination, to navigate and render conceivable. Here the compass is largely created by the mechanisms of poetry – analogy is how we provoke this mechanism into revolution; it is what How are things? ultimately pokes at with its own means.

moving: Doug Melnyk
March 23 – April 21, 2001

a response to the exhibition by Shawna Dempsey

It is a laughable irony that we struggle so hard to create images and shapes which move and provoke our audiences, when we all know that nothing is more beautiful or challenging than the myriad of forms found in nature, not the least of which are our own narcissistically fascinating, endlessly varied and magnificently finely-wrought bodies. The fantastic artwork of evolution leaves us all in the dust, imitators at best. Nothing we can build, paint or perform comes close to skin against skin, an animal’s gait, a hand, a paw, a smile, yet we cannot resist echoing the process that brought us here. Each artist struggles to make something new; make something better. Within us explode big bangs of creation, ideas demanding to be built, painted and performed, evolutions which we ink onto paper. We refine these generations of thought and image, make them relevant to our time and place. The resulting ideas change and move continuously, moving us (as people and artists) forward.

trace: Leah Decter
January 19 – February 17, 2001

a response to the exhibition by Lori Fontaine

upon entering, i am drawn to the left – a long wall running the length of the gallery, broken by 3 pillars. here, evenly spaced, are 21 “tooth boxes”. within each meticulously-framed square is a single tooth, sculpted and then cast in lead, apparently suspended in space – held fast by a horizontal lead post.

x3 exhibition and sale of multiples @
December 5 – December 9, 2000

a response to the event by Philip Hugo Koch

We’re not used to seeing the inner workings of the exchange of art objects. Artworks are usually held with a special regard, their presentation restricted to well-prepared settings and occasions where proper relations to their audience may be effected. A certain purity is expected of the experience of art, and awareness of the transactions necessary to achieve its presentation would seem to interfere with that purity.

sidewalk project: by Doug Lewis
October 27 – November 25, 2000

a response to the exhibition by mariianne mays

Community … has come to connote very much the “exclusive community” … and perhaps it may always have denoted that exclusivity … What I have sought to work with is directed entirely against that vision of community, and against any interiority of community … The impossible as jouissance (and not jouissance as impossible!) … Every community must share the impossible, lest it fall beneath the hallucinatory reign of an interiority, an identity, etc.

-Jean Luc Nancy

Ah yes. The politics of the city sidewalk. Do you make eye contact? Do you say hello? Move aside? Hold your ground? Hold your breath?

If you’re a self-described “flâneur,” like artist Doug Lewis, you may frequently find yourself negotiating these very questions. Sidewalk Project embodies such pedestrian concerns with care, humour and generous poetic insight.

I walk in, or we are gathered here …

Prescribing Behaviour (fear & JOY): Fiona Kinsella
September 15 – October 14, 2000
a response to the exhibition by Diane Lemieux

The word “prescribe” implies a directive – to fix authoritatively for the sake of order or clear understanding. Its medical reference also suggests something in need of attention, something broken or not quite anatomically or physiologically correct. In Fiona Kinsella’s exhibition Prescribing Behaviour (fear & JOY), she investigates the realm of human physical vulnerability. The artist manipulates found and collected items, those of lost significance, and imbues them with a new sense of meaning and purpose. The reworking and reordering of these objects, along with the assimilation of medical text and imagery and the repetitive nature of the work itself convey an ambiguous message.

the perfect past: Sara Angelucci
September 15 – October 14, 2000

a response to the exhibition by Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Where memory enacts light, a presence of impossible convergence…

– Erin Mouré ¹

Sara Angelucci makes bad photographs. The large-scale, single and multi-exposure images of outdoor scenes that constitute her most recent body of work, collectively titled The Perfect Past, read as textbook examples of what not to do. She uses a mass-produced toy camera held together with duct tape, and at times it is nearly impossible to make out what has been photographed for all the blurring, light leaks and bleeding that occur. Some of the images even have numbers in them, the result of light seeping in through the back of the camera. (Oops!) Furthermore, as if to flaunt her shoddy technique, she often shoots from the window of a moving vehicle as she travels around. One might well ask: “Does she know what she’s doing?!”

THEATRE OF PAINT: Derek Brueckner
June 20 – July 15, 2000

a response to the exhibition by Grant Guy

A few years ago, for the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, I presented a two part talk on the new theatre and performance art. The historical overview journeyed from Leonardo da Vinci to Robert Wilson and Ping Chong. At the end of the talk I solicited responses from the playwrights in attendance. One playwright quickly dismissed the six hour talk with the conclusive comment , “It’s not theatre. There is no drama.” His feeling seemed to be shared by many of the other playwrights. But for me, drama can be theatre, but theatre is not necessarily drama.

River: Michael Fernandes
June 16 – July 15, 2000

a response to the exhibitiion by Kevin Matthews

We spend a lot of time pretending we’re not immersed, the way a fish isn’t wet, the way we seem to exist discretely, independent of environment. All the while, we recieve signals and corruptions from the fields and corridors through which we move. Each space gives us its incidental messages, even the most innocuous environment is suggesting, offering ideas and opinions. Perhaps the less attention we call to their influence, the more pervasive it is – we are made and undone by environment.

Hubbub: Daniel Barrow, Ken Gregory, Chris Marten
June 15 and 16, 2000

a response to the exhibition by Randal McIlroy

“What kind of world would be sympathetic to the music we feel must be made?” That question was posed by Eddie Prevost, a percussionist, composer, theorist and for more than three decade an anchor figure in AMM, and English ensemble devoted to the exploration of music in the moment. While Prevost’s provocative question relates more specifically to a different ethic, it resonated during a recent two evenings of sound performance at aceartinc.

Lesbian Biology 101(circa 1950): case studies: Szu Burgess
March 31 – April 29, 2000

a response to the exhitibition by Robert Shaw

WHAT I READ
Remember when first you read Sarah Schulman’s novel, People in Trouble? The one set in the East Village? About a love triangle between a straight artist couple and the woman’s lesbian lover? Where the woman in the middle is a performance artist whose performance defeats a greedy landlord, and there’s an interracial gay male couple, one of whom dies of AIDS, and there’s a scene where the lesbian meets the straight guy and they form a strained relationship, and the lesbian couple becomes involved in organizations defending people with AIDS and an AIDS activist hatches a scheme to steal credit cards to feed the poor? Doesn’t ring a bell?

bottom / top: by MY NAME IS SCOT
March 31 – April 29, 2000

a response to the exhibition by Darrel Ronald

“It reminds me of Auschwitz.” He said. I heard him, and agreed. I wasn’t going to ask him any more than that. He was Jewish, and had been there before. I wasn’t Jewish but had also been to the camp. Whereas I can talk about it, he can’t. It means too much. “There’s a terror underlying all the structures, it even scares me,” I carry on, thinking backwards. I was in Poland only eleven months ago. The entire day floats close to the surface of memory.

What the world needs now is a sense of humour and love sweet love: Debra Mosher
February 18 – March 18, 2000

a response to the exhibition by Cliff Eyland

Debra Mosher makes two kinds of art: photographs, many of which are portraits; and expressionistic paintings, such as those in this exhibition.

Tinkering, Sensors, Machines and Me: Ken Gregory
January 21 – February 18, 2000
a response to the exhibition by Kevin Matthews

Tempting indeed it is to see too much in Ken Gregory’s machines, to zoomorphise or anthropomorphise them – some of them anyway. There are two kinds of machines here, musical machines and mobile machines, and the conceptual axes between them are far too clear in my mind to be stable. Let’s test one and see if it doesn’t collapse.

Salt of the Earth: Vanessa Eidse
January 14 – February 12, 2000
a response to the exhibition by Ellen Peterson

If given the opportunity, I would not revisit the garden where I spent my childhood. One magic acre of flowers, tire swings, and a treehouse across the road from a row of badly distressed houses and a smelly factory. I don’t go back there because I know it would be smaller than in my memory. I prefer to keep that magic place frozen in my mind. What surprises me is how often that garden visits me. I was not expecting to find it, full of flowers, on grubby McDermot Avenue.

Mourning: Barb Hunt
October 29 – November 27, 1999
a response to the exhibition by Sheila Spence

To mourn is to show sorrow or regret over loss as defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Emotions surrounding loss are much more layered and complex than this definition. Sorrow and regret are magnified by visceral memories of touch, laughter, pleasure. Often what is no longer there becomes more real in its absence. A personal loss evokes for each of us the cycle of birth, growth, death, decay and renewal and calls upon us to engage in rituals or processes to ground us and comfort us.

Stories and Iyalogues: Visual Memories, History and Identity: Gomo George
September 24 – October 23, 1999
a response to the exhibition by Gerry Atwell

For a non-visual artist, the prospect of writing about visual arts is intimidating to say the least. After visiting Gomo George’s installation, Stories and Iyahlogues (Visual Memories, History and Identity) at Ace Art Gallery, however, I felt compelled to offer some personal impressions of his work. As a Black Canadian musician and writer, I have frequently written about race and identity, always with the hope of sharing perspectives, reducing obstacles and celebrating humanity.

RAPT: Kathleen Sellars and Susan Shantz
August 20 – September 18, 1999

a response to the exhibition by Jake Moore

Some of the elements that comprise the exhibition ,rapt: a correspondence of objects were originally solicited for a joint exhibition in Saskatoon at AKA Artist Run Centre “based on similarities in [the artists'] use of sculpture to articulate aspects of female sensuality. The artists decided to minimize verbal exchange and concentrate on making and maiing scuptural objects. Each object would be made in response to the last one received.”¹ The conversation continues here, as complex and nuanced as dialogue becomes between equals with affection for one another and the offerings that are presented.

Degenerate Art: Bonnie Marin
February 12 – March 6, 1999
a response to the exhibition by Szu Burgess

In another place, at another time, Bonnie Marin would be sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe discussing montage with Hannah Hoch and preparing new work for an exhibition of Berliner Dadaists. Marin would likely have been a key member of the Berlin Dada Club, which changed the face of art in the first decade of the 20th Century; a group united by an ironic cynicism and a desire to provoke.

MAN MADE: Evan Tapper
January 8 – February 6, 1999

a response to the exhibition by Jack Lauder

“Why me?” I cried, seeing my face in the mirror. One eye was swollen shut – my eyebrow had become part of my upper lip. What the hell happened yesterday? I remember an awful day spent dealing with inflexible people, then a pint or two, then Evan’s opening – I said I would write about the work. We’re supposed to meet this afternoon. I can’t – not today.

DANCE OF GAIA: Angela Luvera
October 9 – November 7, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Tricia Wasney

“It is clear that polarities loom large in human thought. All cultures note and deal with such oppositions as night/day (or darkness/light), male/female, sky/earth, life/death, and a host of others… the attractiveness of dualistic thinking lies… in the solution it offers to the problem of ensuring an ordered relationship between antitheses that cannot be allowed to become antipathies. It is not so much that it offers order, for all systems of thought do that, but that it offers equilibrium. Dualistic theories create order by postulating a harmonious interaction of contradictory principles.”¹

THE BROWN SHOW: Scott Hadaller, Simon Hughes, Cathy Kuryk, Les Newman and Paul Robles
September 3 – September 26, 1998
a response to the exhibition by Blair Marten

Pre-linguistic universal truth ‘number one’: ‘Pinch a loaf’ too hard while defecating, and face the potential of a hemorrhoid-dappled event horizon.

Pre-linguistic universal truth ‘number two’: Give up and ‘go with the flow’, and meet the post-bathroom query “So, did everything come out all right?” with an affirmative response.

SHUDDER: Rita McKeough
August 7, 1998

a response to the exhibition Deirdre Logue and Kim Truchan

As performers in Rita McKeough’s work Shudder, we experience the work as both empathic participants and as physical bodies. We are simultaneously corporeal elements and emotional recipients, existing within the layers and cycles of the work. Although the piece is most specifically about the realities and implications of fear, the experience of Shudder is substantially more complex, giving rise to feelings of dissonance, containment, anxiety and despair. We are performing bodies on the precipice of articulation, on the edge of language, on the tip of the tongue – both consumed and set free.

In flight there is the promise of escape.

ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST: Sharon Alward
July 20 – July 25, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Stephen Phelps

In St. John the Baptist performance/ installation artist Sharon Alward is a sight to behold. Framed by a columned portico, she’s seated on a revolving stool, bare-skinned except for a diaper, a halter and the outlandish, surpassing fancy of a pair of neon wings. Her illuminated figure, marble-like in the neon’s gentle glare, presents a picture of grave incandescence on its motorized perch – a bio-luminescent angel bought to earth and put on display. From the axial centre at the base of her spine to the outer radius of her knees, she makes a perfect dial, strikingly in sync with the motion of the gears. As the perambulating skull meets the overspill of an angled spotlight, we glimpse a violent splash of red on blonde – the telltale drippings of an overhead tap whose mouth delivers a steady trickle of ketchup directly onto the head, like a Chinese water torture. The dribbling paste beats a remorseless tattoo as it plops, slowly hardening into a gelatinous clot that encrusts the scalp like glue.

A Ferocious Longing: Connie Cohen
May 29 – June 27, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Joan Thomas

1: I dropped in at Ace Art before A Ferocious Longing opened, while Connie Cohen was still at work. Part of me said it was a mistake to s ee the installation in process (the part that knows art as a conjurer’s trick, and doesn’t want to see its inner workings). In fact, A Ferocious Longing had a meaning for me then that faded later.

HOT: Tanya Mars
May 14 – May 16, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Sheila Spence

Dressed in a floor-length black skirt and a lace vest, the artist, at a distance, appears formal and elegant. A closer look reveals a once conventionally beautiful woman with a full beard. Her fragile bones are on the outside. In the distance a voice repeats “Do you love me?”.

Light / Shadow / Dark: Ron Gorsline
April 9 – May 16, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Derek Brueckner

Why Paint?
I would like to start this with a disclaimer. I do not consider this tex to be the initial charge of a long and lucrative writing career, nor do I consider myself to be a historian, critic, critical writer or any kind of competent writer for that matter. I am grateful, however, that Ace Art has facilitated a situation where a visual artist and studio teacher (or at least that is how I position myself) can have his say or little rant. Partly due to selfishness, I wish to emphasize some issues of painting that desperately need to be brought into focus, and it seems, after having taped an interview with Gorsline at Ace Art, that these issues are important to him as well. Also, Jennifer Woodbury has generously volunteered to write regarding the work in Light / Shadow / Dark and, I suspect, will do a far better job in ters of insight into the meaning of Gorsline’s paintings than I ever could. So here it goes!

Literally: Kelly Mark
March 6 – March 29, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Cliff Eyland

I have known Kelly Mark for a few years. Not so long ago, she ran the bar at an alternative gallery in Halifax called the Khyber, which was once as famous for its raves as its parallel art programming. The Khyber keeps up its alternative art credentials, but its bar is licensed now, and Mark has moved back to Hamilton. Meanwhile, her career has taken off: she is now represented by Toronto’s Wynick/Tuck Gallery; she will join a few other Canadian artists in the next Sydney Biennial; and she has just had a solo show at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Flashpoint: Helene Dyck
February 27 – April 4, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Erika MacPherson

chapter one I STEP INTO THE GALLERY
a quick survey. i’m in the reception area. it’s dark. in the background a warm pool of light spills onto a lone narrow shelf. two books on the shelf catch the light. they stand upright. they’re static but windblown, the bottoms of the pages pulling up, weathered. the hinged plywood covers of the book reminiscent of doors, a coffin, a cupboard, the proportions of a human body. i hinge open the doors of the book to the vellum paged rooms inside. the images are sensuous, soft photographic studies; tree bark, mattress, a faintly blurred image of a girl running in the grass… a personal archive, a photographic diary. images to trigger some memory, something that words can’t quite remember, like the smell of your grandmother’s house year after year always taking you back to your childhood. as with most books there is a dedication: for jake flashpoint, the bookwork.

Exhalt Fax and Other Techno Sirens: Aurora Landin
January 16 – February 21, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Susan Turner

Even the title of Aurora Landin’s exhibition is arresting: “exalt”, implying wonder, religiosity, awe, and praise; “fax”, possibly a Latin word from the past and, therefore, distanced from us, but no – it’s “fax”, the abbreviation for “facsimile”, an exact replica of an original, but of lesser quality – not as valuable or durable; not as precious. Machine-made, accessible, dispensable. FAX. Something quick, technological; but then equally as quickly, from the digitally altered, computer generated print at the entrance to the exhibition, I infer that a joke is also implied. A toy store with the name EXALT and which offers FAX services is on the route that Landin takes to the University of Manitoba where she teaches printmaking; window signage has placed the two words in humourously inappropriate syntactical contiguity.

Glass Armour: Fragile Shields: Karen Justl
December 6 , 1997 – January 10, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Susan Chafe

TITLES: Soft Target; the dimming vision; oh terrible language; long in the tooth, ribs removed to identify position in the cavity of the chest; a ghost pain; articular motives; disarticulation; mask to identify virtue; not listening; a thing that hinges hold; sentimental resignation; slitting my memory on a poetry of glass shards; dislocated pressure; if you were oyster and your teeth pearls; can you see, a pool of frozen water on the moon, intention exists before language.

Photogenic and Lost: two performances by Grant Guy
November 27 – 29, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Sharon Alward

“To learn truly what each thing is, is a matter of uncertainty.” ( Democritus 500 BCE)

Democritus, the laughing philosopher, suggested that the soul is a form of fire which animates the human body and that pleasure along with self control was the goal of life. His statement that we know nothing truly about anything, but that for each of us, opinion is an influx conveyed by the influx of idols from without is at the heart of the evening of performances by Winnipeg artist Grant Guy.

Captive and Absent: Lori Rogers
October 29 – November 22, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Vera Lemecha

At the end of this century, technology is taking the place of what we have defined previously as nature. It is the environment in which we are situated and against which we measure ourselves. Rogers’ use of nature speaks not of a desire for reconciliation with the natural, but investigates our situation in the late twentieth century in which the technological has become the natural. Many of us engage daily with technology – automatic bank machines, voice mail, cel phones, electronic mail, the Internet, computer games, word-processing, and so on. In a very short time the use of these technologies has become so much a part of our daily lives that it is difficult for us to fully comprehend our relationship to them and to the way our relationship to the world has been mediated through them. Allucquére Rosanne Stone, restating Marshall McLuhan’s pronouncement, “the medium is the message,” indicates that it is hard to see what technology does because what it does is silently and pervasively restructure seeing.¹ Rogers’ investigation has to do with a venture Stone describes as “not into the heart of ‘nature’ in search of redemption, but rather into the heart of ‘technology’ in search of nature – and not nature as object, place or originary situation…[but] as a continual reinvention and encounter actively resisting representation.”²

A Bird in the Hand: Alex Poruchnyk
September 19 – October 12, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Grant Guy

On Opening Night. . .

A Voice In The Dark: “It is too much to take in all at once.”

Tricia Wasney Wrote In The Guest Book: “I liked (and didn’t like) being distracted, wanting to see everything, not wanting to miss anything.”

Is this not Life, in both serenity and in panic?

Burning Bridges: Jarod Charzewski
May 30 – September 27, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Alison Gillmor

The first and probably the most accessible way to see Burning Bridges is as a series of ten wooden doors that are either rising triumphantly or falling into despair, depending on your viewpoint (physical and emotional). Taken with the work’s site – a scrubby open field in Winnipeg’s North End – the doorways act as a striking metaphor for a community in uneasy transition. But it’s important not to stop there, at that intellectually comfy construct. Artist Jarod Charzewski, blindsides the paradigm of public sculpture as monumental, untouchable, timeless product, looking instead at processes – weather, decay, human interaction, and most of all – time and what they do to materials. Responses to his work need to do something like that too, not worrying about neat conclusions but enjoying uncertainties, unresolved tensions – the practice of thinking about art and not just the final results.

Not What We Are: Susan Turner
April 18 – May 10, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Robert Sauvey

entry #1

I was down at Ace Art today meeting with Jennifer. Susan Turner was there. I told her that I was writing the Critical Distance for her upcoming show at Ace Art. She was really pleased when I told her that I was looking forward to writing it. We made plans to meet at her studio for a pre-exhibition visit. Susan offered to serve lunch – a bonus. She phoned later to set a date.

The Pretender Series: Patrick Hartnett
March 21 – April 12, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Al Rushton

With six minutes of every TV half hour devoted to claims of commercial quality, it’s refreshing when someone comes along and says, “Hey, this isn’t the Real Thing.” Patrick Hartnett’s recent Ace Art installation: The Pretender Series does just this. Using computer photo manipulation, Hartnett flies in the face of vainglorious advertising claims and frowningly serious contemporary art, both presenting themselves as Gospels of the moment.

Solo Groping in the Dark: Sharon Raynard
March 21 – April 12, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Jennifer Stillwell

In the automatic age we have not ignored the love-machine — we physically have become a mechanical competitor, and we have the desire to perfect not only our environment but also ourselves and our bodies. We are finding we are not living up to the capabilities of our bodily extensions. We alone survive as a kind of mushy love-machine proficient in thrills we attempt to define and control, and our culture tends to reduce sex to a question of mechanics, hygiene, and fashion.

The 49th Parallel Project: Gregor Turk
February 14 – March 8, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Douglas William Lewis

Maps, or even more specifically, boundaries are often defined within the physical realm by two or more intersecting regions of space, mass or time; the sociological and psychological metaphors of boundaries are, of course, of an unparalleled importance. Maps have a tendency to appear to take the abstract world and reformulate it into something humanity can digest, in other words, helping us locate our periphery. According to Websters’ Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary a map is “1.b. a representation of the celestial sphere or part of it”. This may convincingly assist in our perception of our corporeal situation, even though cartographical history has shown us that maps can be biased, inconsistent and often antiquated. Yet, somehow we still live with them as one of the methods of defining ourselves as ‘regions’. The 49th parallel, being one of the longest straight ‘lines’ or boundaries, was the premise for much of Gregor Turk’s exhibition at Ace Art.

evolutio: by Karen Spencer
January 10 – February 1, 1997

a response to the exhibition by Marian Butler

Myths of Work/Rules of Thumb: Leslie Thompson
November 29 – December 21, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Sheila Spence

The exhibition by Toronto artist Leslie Thompson is made up of two separate pieces: Myths of Work and Rules of Thumb. In the photo installation Myths of Work Thompson begins the journey back from the patriarchal beliefs of business towards some form of matriarchy.

Emergence: Wendy Wersch
November 12 – November 23, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Catherine MacDonald

November 13, 1996.
Standing in silence she begins to sway as if responding to the subtle shifts of energies and wind currents, lulled by the rattling of the steam heaters and the banging and clanking rhythms of old pipes contracting in the cold.

Her silence is strong and determined, she is primordial woman standing naked, cocooned in her memories and in the bits and pieces of her guilt.

She is standing in the echo of her voice… the silence explains. The echo reaches through eons of time…her head is surrounded by the fear and terror of her own thoughts.

footnote: by Stella Meades
October 18 – November 9, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Heidi Eigenkind

In footnote, Stella Meades pays homage to the circumstances of her own childhood and to those children still affected by war and ethnic hatreds.¹ Taking as her starting point, a 1995 UNICEF statistic that 6,000,000 children have been disabled or killed in the last decade, Meades handbuilt 1001 shoes. Each one of the first 1000 represents 6000 injured or dead children. The extra shoe moves the installation beyond the statistic’s timeline, into the present and the future.

to sow: Jake Moore
September 13 – October 12, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Susan Chafe

Drag City: Curated by Robert Sauvey
September 6 – October 15, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Cathy Collins

Once my mother convinced my Dad to wear her Aunt’s black cut velvet and silk flapper dress to a Hallowe’en party. This was a significant accomplishment in light of my Dad’s origins in Presbyterian and Tory rural Ontario. Underneath his silky, cut velvet, black dress, Dad wore the usual Stanfields. It was a safe masquerade, the way Milton Berle played comic female roles as the host of Texaco Star Theater in the early days of television. Existing gender stereotypes were reinforced. Dad’s cross-dressing wasn’t drag because he wasn’t creating a new identity either in his mind or in his behavior. Clearly drag is a state of mind driven by fantasy and desire. How else would a muscled, tattooed boy with a badly fitting blonde wig manage to look thoughtfully girlish in a photo-portrait by David Rasmus?

On the Skin: Diana Thorneycroft and Michael Boss
April 26 – May 18, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Tom Lovatt

Omne Ex Ovum/Spiralling to Fill and Emptiness: Jillian MacDonald
January 12 – February 10, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Louise May

No Show: Christine Kirouac
January 5 – February 3, 1996

a response to the exhibition by Louise Loewen

The following text was written as a reflection on the sculptural work of Christine Kirouac in No Show. It represents many informal discussions that Christine and I have shared about corporeality: limitations and strengths of our bodies, societal misconception of women with strength, norms and expectations of women’s bodies, the transformational ability of the body, sex, life in utero, birth and death. This series of self-portraits are wall-mounted constructions with industrial domes, medical latex, chains, ropes, lines and backlit duratrans photographs.

The Tightrope Walker: Petra Mueller
December 2 – December 23, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Angela Somerset

It must be like going to a film; you enter into the screen, you forget abut the camera, the actors, everything–you’re lost in the story, and when you come out, it’s like coming from a dream.

-Guy Caron, Artistic Director – Cirque Du Soliel

sound machine – Noise of Wonder: Michael Dumontier and T.R. Elliott
September 1 – September 23, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Marian Butler

The Oxford Universal Dictionary states that wonder is the emotion excited by the perception of something novel and unexpected, or inexplicable; astonishment mingled with perplexity or bewildered curiosity.

after the gleaners: Kay Cherniski
May 19 – June 10, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Sigrid Dahle

“When Minimalist painting was the rage in university departments all over the country, a New York critic toured some of the major Midwestern schools. He saw canvas after abstract canvas, but they tended to be strangely gray compared to the paintings he knew in New York. Finally he realized the problem. Midwestern students had been getting their information about Minimalism from the art journals, and the gray tones represented what happened to an abstract painting after it was put through a color-separation process and was printed as a photolithograph in an art magazine.”¹

after the gleaners: Kay Cherniski
May 19 – June 10, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Michael Boss

The exhibition:
17 paintings (8 original and 9 copies of works by Vermeer, Daumier, Corot, Millet, da Vinci and Van Gogh) juxtaposed with the plates in the books from which the copies were made.

The subject matter:
genre; including flowers, portraits, landscape and animals.

The reaction:
Controversy: Why?

I believe it was because of the pervasive prejudices that this presentation confronted.

still life: Aganetha Dyck and Karen Thornton
March 24 – April 18, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Doug Melnyk

“It’s so sexy!” Aganetha said to me, on a day that I had a long conversation with her in her studio, speaking at this point about the massive body of honeybees she had encountered in their hive.

“Did you ever touch them? You can put your hand inside the hive, gently, if you’re careful. Don’t make any fast movements or do anything reckless. You just put your hand down very slowly and gently, until it’s on top of the surface of their backs. Oh my, it’s so warm. And of course, it feels furry. It’s warm and so furry, and it’s just pulsing with life. It just throbs!”

Aganetha’s relationship with bees, after years of reading about them and working directly with bees and professional beekeepers, is a very complex relationship.

inside out: Sarah Crawley and William Eakin
February 24 – March 18, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Sigrid Dahle

“Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. These spheres of life are linked through an ‘in between’ temporality that takes the measure of dwelling at home, while producing an image of the world of history. This is the moment of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative with a double edge which…represents a hybridity, a difference ‘within’, a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality. And the inscription of this borderline existence inhabits a stillness of time and a strangeness of framing that creates the discursive ‘image’ at the crossroads of history and literature, bridging the home and the world.” ¹

inside out: Sarah Crawley and William Eakin
February 24 – March 18, 1995

a response to the exhibition  by Cliff Eyland

Most of us merely “take” a picture–we’re happy with whatever comes back from the drug store. Artists and other professional photographers, however, “make” photographs. The photograph is not a window on unvarnished reality, and we all know that the striking, “spontaneous” image of a battle or a disaster we see on the front page of the Winnipeg Free Press or the Sun is probably a carefully cropped, dodged and digitally or manually manipulated image which has been picked out of innumerable contact sheets.

Dark O’Clock: Stephen Andrews, Doug Ischar, Mathew Jones, Wanda Koop, Glenn Ligon
January 17 – February 18, 1995

a response to the exhibition by Alison Gillmor

When I started to write about Dark O’clock, I had to check the spelling of the word “glamorous” (g-l-a-m-o-u-r-o-u-s? g-l-a-m-o-r-o-u-s?). The Collins Concise told me that the word comes from an 18th-century Scottish variation of “grammar,” meaning a magic spell, because the occult was associated with learning; the magic spell eventually evolved into the idea of alluring charm, leading to our contemporary notion of glamour as a slightly supernatural force, an aura of beauty, sexiness and power that allows certain people, certain objects, to draw us in. ¹ Glamour and grammar, sex and ideas — recently these two things have not been much connected. The puritanism of a lot of 60’s and 70’s radical art and politics banished glamour, seeing it as shallow, distracting and frivolous. Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman tries to re-integrate radicalism and pleasure, ideas and sex, grammar and glamour — as an earnest, bearded Latin American Marxist, shares a cell with a gay window-dresser, who adores the over-the-top melodramas of the 40’s and 50’s. ² A lot of art in the 90’s, like the work in Dark O’Clock, recognizes the need to turn away from the joyless, sexless daytime clarity of “sociological” art, toward a night-time dynamic of darkness, intrigue, desire and danger. Dark O’Clock artists don’t lose radical content; they use glamour to make me want it even more.

no one….in conversation: Richard Dyck and Reva Stone
December 2 – December 23, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Susan Chafe

“Personally, I found the scene gripping: for a good quarter of an hour my thoughts just wanted to be white oats in that thresher. Sometimes a nearby wing, ten times longer than its counterpart, consented to spell out a letter, never the same one, but I was immediately taken with the character of the whole inscription.”

information junkie: a.f. kiendl
November 4 – November 26, 1994

a response to the exhibition by jake moore

The exhibition, a.f. kiendl’s information junkie, is a collection of works arranged in a space and connected physically to it by snaking cords and wires. Buzzers, motors and compressing air complement the sound of your footsteps in the expanse that is Ace Art. Lower case helvetica tells us the artist’s name and states an affliction, information junkie, quotation marks. If this is an admission of his own circumstance we cannot be certain. It is, though, the title of his book.

Sculptures: Blair Marten
October 7 – October 29, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Bruce Sapach

Upon entering the gallery, one is met by a span of floor space that is dotted with generally small and even miniscule scale objects. They attempt to identify themselves with a significance beyond that which is generally given to a reduced size. Although Blair’s use of materials is obviously still in it’s formative stage, this effort is generally successful. This is due primarily to two aspects that extend beyond the objects themselves. One aspect is their social/philosophical content and origin. The other is the object’s existence in an atmosphere of murky shadow and dim ‘twi-lighting’ that identifies each of the works as a separate presence with their own agendas.

The Gift Horse / I trust You: jake moore
September 9 – October 1, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
(I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts)

- Laocöon

After the Deluge: Jean-Yves Vigneau
July 15 – August 6, 1994

a response to the exhibition by A. F. Kiendl

In his installation After the Deluge, Quebec sculptor Jean-Yves Vigneau uses found objects to create a tableau which asks the viewer to consider spatial and temporal relationships. By asking one to consider their place, geographically and historically, Vigneau shows how the act of framing or positioning can have ramifications in one’s perception.

By using common objects from everyday life, he also shares personal reflections on one’s place in Natural History and geological time. To accomplish this he uses daily fluctuations in Earth and Sea, such as low and high tide, as metaphors for terrestrial fluctuations on a grander scale. He places found objects in a context which metaphorically increases their meaning.

Lies about Betty and The Truth About Zucchini: Lori Weidenhammer
29 May – 27 June, 1998

a response to the exhibition by Lisa Mark

I saw Lori’s performance the night before the beginning of Perf ‘94 (the performance art conference sponsored by the Saint Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre) and that has certainly coloured, if not intensified, my initial response to her work. Let me explain…

Ione Thorkelsson: Ione Thorkelsson
6 May – 28 May, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Jan Horner

The essential qualities of glass – light, airiness, fluidity – appear to be denied in Ione Thorkelsson’s new pieces with chicken, goose, turkey and wild turkey feet. This unexpected impression was as much caused by the dense texture of the surfaces and cloudy opaqueness of some of the glass used as by the imagery suggested by her creations. Fowl are flightless, often domesticated birds and what Thorkelsson emphasizes about them in her work is their earthbound nature. Special attention is paid to the fascinating ugliness and texture of their feet, warts and all. Meanwhile, the airiness of feathers, the span and grace of the wings are glossed over. Although the initial perception might be one of elegance, the feet are peculiarly naked, absurd and at times menacing.

Languages of sign, medium and figure: Derek Brueckner
April 12 – April 30, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Bev Pike

Imagine Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the top of an American highrise in the 1920’s silent film Safety Last. Wearing a suit, he’s trying to climb back up into a window – with split-second timing he grabs one thing after another, almost falling dramatically with every move he makes. I believe this film was staged and directed by Lloyd, and was made while he was hanging off the side of a real high building in a real windy location. The precision with which his hands and feet found and clung onto ledges, and clock parts even, was breath-taking. In the end, it was his attention to physical details, and his extraordinary skills, which saved his life and made a fabulous movie.

Seasons Seasons: Julie Atkinson
12 April – 30 April, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Cecile Clayton-Gouthro

Playfully punning and poking good naturedly at various representations of the female figure, Julie Atkinson presents us with a series of torsos constructed out of fibre and treasured objects. In her Torso Shield series, the artist has taken materials having personal significance, her grandmother’s buttons, remnants of a friends dress, coveted family fabrics, and combined them to create portraits. In place of paint or pencil – threads, beads and buttons become words to describe the person in the portrait. They beg to be read.

Ken Gregory: performance and audio installation: Ken Gregory
1 April – 7 April, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Jack Lauder

Sound is how the mind perceives the world’s vibrations. Hearing is our one sense that is omnidirectional and sleepless. It is also the one sense that our minds spend the most time blocking out. We hear what we want to hear.

Adhere and Deny’s Musical Chairs: Grant Guy
March 4, 1994 10pm

a response to the exhibition by Robert McKaskell

Performance Art? Event?
Entertainment? (Polite Words.)

Provocation? (Less polite.)

A boring display of ego?
(Downright rude.)

More than the above? Yes.
Less than the above? Yes.

Another dada dumb?

Into the Body Dark: Nancy Litchfield-Hutchison
February 1 – February 19, 1994

a response to the exhibition by Donna Jones

I look at Nancy Litchfield Hutchison’s paintings of women and water; and feel their sensuous environment of night and fluid. I imagine night air soft against skin, water forming itself to the edges of bodies. The figures, such as the woman in Night Swimmer, are painted in colours so light in contrast to the dense blackness that surrounds them, that they seem to glow like phosphorescent sea creatures on a midnight seashore. I imagine them swimming, as in Front Glide, effortlessly through their bottomless and visually impenetrable pools, as if water, not land, is their natural home.