Letter from Winnipeg

Filmmaker Guy Maddin. (Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)

We’re still not sure winter is gone for good here in Winnipeg, so the street cleaning vehicles remain parked in their garages, saving money. Instead of a dappling of verdure and a spring shimmer, our roads have a Siberian sugar-coating of road salt and sand. Now that the snow has melted, five months of car exhaust — collected and transformed into something dazzling on a daily basis by the ice crystals that clog our coruscating air during the frigid season — lies like a black veil over the city.

The thaw has exposed everything jettisoned by Winnipeggers since the first freeze in October — socks, cigs and Slurpee cups. Dog manure, flash-frozen way back when, is spread evenly across the landscape as if it were dropped from an airplane. Now it’s raining hard in Winnipeg, making for deep puddles of thick spring gumbo. Nothing like a little bit of God’s water to wash away the dirt that collects in the Devil’s cleavage!

Time to puddle hop! Time to gallery hop!

My first stop on the last, last Friday of winter is a strange one, set at a strange, unholy time — 5:30 a.m. at Noam Gonick’s Boyopolis. Not really a gallery, Noam’s atelier is a white-walled minimalist masterpiece of downtown living with a breath-taking Cinerama view of the perpetually klieg-lit legislative building and its famous Golden Boy just across the street — it fills the windows and the eyes completely!

These days Boyopolis is the site of a can’t-miss audio installation. The few people that gather here have been up all night, waiting for the show. At the appointed hour, caftan-clad Noamie calls for silence. Then, right on time — for this is Winnipeg! — we hear it: passing directly overhead, as it does every week, the ululating roar of a Soviet-era troop-transport plane loaded to bursting with live Manitoba hogs on their way to China for processing. It’s the result of Sino-Russian entrepreneurial verve paying big dividends — for someone — in the unlikely backwater of Winnipeg, thereby bestowing 21st century business savvy by association onto our city. The installation is not looped, the audio is over in 90 seconds at most, and there is no catalogue or spoken commentary — perhaps the best bang for the buck in town. Everyone shuffles out and the host, closing the door on his satisfied customers, says goodbye till next time.

After Noam’s, I go back to bed until the rest of Friday catches up to Boyopolis. In the afternoon I rise to visit one of my favorite art spots in this drizzly burg, Takashi Iwasaki’s Semai Gallery, oddly located within another gallery — the Keepsake — or rather in the long narrow hallway leading to the Keepsake’s washrooms. Takashi’s ingenious use of this overlooked and unwanted space is heartbreakingly charming, and the watercolours by Patrick Dunford look all the more wonderful for this curious mounting.

Prime time on Friday belongs to Other Gallery, director Paul Butler’s nomadic and virtual space; it boasts no permanent address other than a URL. Yet, Butler’s internet gallery can produce exhibition effects every bit as palpable as any three-dimensional salon. Like any wizard of his art, though, Butler is a bit of a humbug. It’s actually possible to catch him in real time and space in his loft, a converted boiler room purportedly haunted by an '80s suicide, atop an ancient unoccupied Prairie skyscraper. I arrive at Butler’s for Friday night drinks, with Boyopolis doyen Noamie and his sweetie Przemek in tow.

I love it when Other Gallery solidifies out of the digital realm, because its director, who is a suavely put-together and smart young man, keeps a well-stocked bar and spins a great collection of vinyl. Tonight, it’s early, pre-scrofulous ZZ Top (their beards are so trim on the album cover!) and some Van Halen. You have to be an irony contortionist to figure out how to enjoy this music, but once the drinks flow it all goes in easy!

Strewn about the place is fascinating artwork! There’s a collection of meticulously rendered pencil drawings by Richard Williams, the former dean of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba, called Naked Block Party. In this case, the outdoor fête is some kind of granola belt orgy featuring plenty of wisely observed moments of extremely and deliriously explicit copulation, some of it involving animals.

There’s also work by Simon Hughes sitting around — I want to own these odd renderings of civic architectures peopled in every case by puffy stickers of Inuit hunters! On one wall hangs Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline’s Brian Wilson, a painting that depicts a pair of free-floating eyes gushing tears that ramify too many times to count and shimmer in the same stylized way in which a photo-realist might paint the chrome on a new car.

At one point, local artist Jake Kosciuk shows up at the Other Gallery party to sell Butler a fascinatingly puerile drawing of a boxer taking a swipe at a Commodore 64. Paul can only come up with $19 in sofa change, and none of us feels like taking the old elevator down to the ATM. So we pass the hat around until Jake has his $150 in cash, which is how he’s learned to do business in this cheapskate town, I guess. I briefly feel the thrill of being a part owner of this cool piece, but Butler quickly writes me a cheque to cover my donation.

Finally, we’re all off to The Label Gallery, where The Dead Indians are performing an all-ages show. Rapper Wab Kinew makes my eyes mist over when he sings Hood 2 Hood, which contains shout-outs to Ellice Avenue and Orioles Community Club, two childhood haunts of mine. This mistiness stays with me the rest of the evening.

Friday ends where it began: back at Boyopolis for a nightcap. The rain outside is replaced by a thick fog — more diffusion for my weary eyes. Butler silently removes a canvas from Noam’s wall and places it between his rubber boots — a sleepy and nebulous late-night rearrangement of art that trips up my sense of the real. Through the windows, the spectacular vista of the legislative building and its Golden Boy softens in focus, is drowsily effaced by the fog of this late hour, and finally turns into pixels.

Guy Maddin is a Winnipeg-based filmmaker and instructor in film history at the University of Manitoba. His next feature, Love Me – Love My Winnipeg, was commissioned by the Documentary Channel and should be ready for this fall’s film festival season.

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