New: Old news
Arts editor drops ball, star reporter saves day
TIMOTHY BROWN STAFF
COURTESY OF MARTHA STREET STUDIO
Until just recently (February 23), the Martha Street Studio held an exhibit entitled New, which showcased some of Winnipeg’s best printmaking talent. If you read the U of W’s student newspaper, the Uniter, a few weeks ago, you might already know this. Why is it that your own campus newspaper failed to produce an articulate, entertaining article on this exhibit and why it’s quite worth seeing? Well, we simply forgot. This city is full of excellent arts stories to cover and sometimes other really great article ideas are forgotten, lost in the cobwebbed skull of this paper’s arts editor. I’ll admit this article is a little late, but this fine exhibit is definitely worth talking about, even at this late hour.
The Martha Street Studio, which has been a part of Winnipeg for years and has been one of the largest, best-equipped open printmaking facilities in Canada, presented New in partnership with the Other Gallery. Five artists were featured in New: Micah Lexier, Paul Butler, Michael Dumontier, Simon Hughes and Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline, all of whom had excellent artwork on display and all of whom can be described, loosely, as originating here in Winnipeg.
The biggest name in the show, Micah Lexier, is a world-renowned printmaking artist who, though originally from Winnipeg, now resides in New York. His single piece in the show, created in 2006 and titled “All Numbers Are Equal (Four Ways)” was, essentially, a grid of the numbers one to nine displayed four times, with 36 silkscreen prints in total. In each row, the ones stay the same while the rest of the numbers are cropped in different ways. It’s a very interesting piece.
Paul Butler, a diversely talented artist who still works and resides here in Winnipeg, had a few works on display. Three of them featured combinations of different colours on what looked to be ripped pieces of paper. The compositions were interesting and his use of colours worked very well. He also had a piece which consisted of two different prints, titled “The Difference Between,” which was a unique look at wood on wood, the foreground being a piece of bark and the background being simply a different texture of wood.
Michael Dumontier’s pieces were compositionally driven, with a few of them using prints of matchsticks to form different arrangements on the page. He also had a unique print with eight tree branches strategically placed on the page.
Simon Hughes had some of my favourite pieces of the exhibit. There were a series of prints of icebergs as well as two other pieces of simple, almost architectural drawings done with ballpoint pen and water colours. Placed strategically on the drawings were tiny stickers of Inuit people. The stickers have actually become sort of a trademark for Hughes, and definitely add a sense of playfulness to whatever drawing they’re placed on.
The last artist of the exhibit was Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. He had these wonderful prints of a series of four men, all in different themes as well as colour-schemes. They were very animated, and while the subject matter is on the mature side, they still seem very childlike and are just plain fun to look at. Krisjanis also had a painting of his displayed, the fantastic colours of which greatly illuminate the piece. It was soft, though the subject matter, once again, tended to pull you away from the warm playfulness of the tones and drag you towards what is happening in the painting itself.
The exhibit was one of the best I’ve been to in recent memory, the artists’ works being, to say the least, fantastic. It is always nice to see that sort of talent actually reside here in Winnipeg; it almost makes you proud to live here. It’s just unfortunate that we couldn’t inform you earlier.
