Winnipeg artists invade Paris

La Maison Rouge contemporary art gallery, Paris, France (Noam Gonick)

Seventy Winnipeg artists are taking over contemporary art gallery La Maison Rouge in Paris, France this summer.  It is the only city in Canada to receive this honour.  

The idea originated with French artist Hervé DiRosa, who fell in love with Guy Maddin's award-winning film, My Winnipeg.  The film inspired him to fly here to check out more of the art scene. And what Hervé took back with him to France was a plan to bring Winnipeg art to Paris.

The exhibit is called "My Winnipeg"  and of course Guy Maddin is a part of the show.  Marcel Dzama, Wanda Koop and Diana Thorneycroft are other stellar local artists that have works in the exhibition. 

Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick is one the co-curators and he sent SCENE this postcard from Paris on opening night. 

It's opening night of a multi-faceted art exhibit at La Maison Rouge, co-presented by Plug In ICA and co-curated by myself, with Paula Aisemberg, Hervé DiRosa, Anthony Kiendl and Sigrid Dahl.

This is my first curatorial effort and I liken the pre-show jitters to being a film producer rather than the director at a premiere.

I've chosen 30 artists for my section, several of whom made the trip for the opening. Sharon Alward is here in the flesh with video documentation of her famous 1990 performance piece Totentanz - a moment forever etched in Plug In history when she mopped semen and blood off the gallery floor as a comment on the impact of the AIDS epidemic on women.

Louis Bakó is here showing three paintings, his first show in Paris in thirty-six years. Sharron Zenith Corne is showing Feminist drawings of genital shapes she made in the mid-'70s around the era she co-curated the ground breaking exhibit "Woman as Viewer" at the WAG.  

My show is entitled "Winter Kept Us Warm" and the thematic looks at the frenzied erotic imaginings of artists working with every medium from scultpture to screenprints. The bilingual catalogue was delivered this morning while La Maison Rouge hosted the French media and an inner circle of gallery 'friends' - art collectors who support the foundation that runs this deluxe private museum.

So far so good, the buzz was good and hundreds of people are expected for tonight's big blowout with an after party on the Seine.

The show is up all summer and then tours to Séte in the south of France at the museum of Hervé DiRosa, the artist whose obsession with the Royal Art Lodge and Guy Maddin and all things Winnipeg spurred this exhibit.

Winnipeg Filmmaker Noam Gonick 

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