Leif Norman photographer

NUIT BLANCHE Winnipeg is a free all-night exploration and celebration of contemporary art.

Debuting in Winnipeg in September 2010 the concept of NUIT BLANCHE originated in France in 1984 and has since spread to many cities around the world.

NUIT BLANCHE Winnipeg is held annually on either the last Saturday of September or the first Saturday of October.

It coincides with Culture Days, which is an annual, collaborative coast-to-coast-to-coast volunteer movement to raise the awareness, accessibility, participation and engagement of Canadians in the arts and cultural life of their communities.

NUIT BLANCHE Winnipeg events are focused in three main zones:
1. Downtown / Winnipeg Art Gallery / Plug In
2. Exchange District
3. St. Boniface

In 2011 over 30 events attracted over 7500 participants throughout the three zones.

http://nuitblanchewinnipeg.ca

NO SLEEP ONLY ART at the Winnipeg Art Gallery

Saturday, September 29 2012 from 6pm to 6am

A FREE contemporary arts party from 6pm to 6am. Last year 4,500 people showed up so you know it’s the place to be!

• Public opening of Winnipeg Now at 7pm—our first major Centennial exhibition
• Panel discussion with Winnipeg Now artists Guy Maddin, Sarah Anne Johnson, Michael Dudeck, and Paul Butler at 8pm
• Patio on the building ramp with music by Reverend Rambler, Dirksboro, Les Jupes, and This Hisses
• Random Acts of Opera with the Little Opera Company
• Artist village on Colony Street–Purchase ceramics, jewelry, fibre art, glass, and paintings created by local artists.
• Exegesis, a performance by Michael Dudeck Witchdoctor, a hybrid religious ceremony merging post-punk synth-pop with drone-chants inspired by Buddhist and Gregorian chant, as well as vocoder-affected lyrics
• Luminosity—a midnight fashion show on the rooftop featuring the fall/winter collections of local designers
• Film screenings: Art & Stone,  Paula Kelly’s film about the iconic WAG building (12:30am-1am; Orson Welles and Goya (1-2am); Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2-6am)
• Collaborative mural painting led by Graffiti Arts Programming artists Pat Lazo and Nereo Eugenio
• Synthetica—the latest interactive installation by PO-MO. Controlled entirely by the gestures of the audience, a riot of sound and motion ensues. colour and form dazzle as the audience creates an ever-changing mural of epic proportions
• Winnipeg Fashion Incubator presents Luminosity the Fashion Show—when the clock strikes twelve, see fall/winter 2012 collections on the rooftop runway.
• Fashion designers; Bickford, Drew
  Espinosa, Alex
  Joyce, Elizabeth
  Joyce, Zanna
  Kiesler, Allan
  Lavack, Lili
  Myers, Abigail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winnipeg Now

 September 29, 2012 to December 30, 2012

Winnipeg Now is a pulse-taking exhibition in which equal weight falls on both words in the show’s title: it is a measure of what art-making looks like in this city in 2012. Whether the artists are living here – like Sarah Anne Johnson and Guy Maddin – or whether they live in Brooklyn or Montreal – like Marcel Dzama and Daniel Barrow – a spirit of risk-taking and invention permeates the work.

Winnipeg has earned a world-wide reputation as an art-producing centre and artists from here regularly exhibit internationally. Winnipeg Now brings their most recent work home: of the 13 artists in the exhibition, 12 are making new work for this exhibition. Whether it’s the animated model schooner and the technicolour stratosphere of Sarah Anne Johnson’s installation, Guy Maddin’s shooting of a film a day for 4 days on set in the gallery, or KC Adams’s porcelain forest of corporate-lit trees, Winnipeg Now will surprise and challenge audiences with work that hasn’t been seen before. The city’s past is its foundation; innovation is its present.

Historically, the art that Winnipeg’s long-standing reputation rested on was drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, with celebrated artists like Ivan Eyre, Don Reichert, Aganetha Dyck, Wanda Koop, Eleanor Bond, David McMillan and William Eakin. What the work in this exhibition indicates is that the younger generation of artists has adopted a more hybridized approach to art-making. The result is a collection of work that resists categorical boundaries and combines a number of art practices. Dominique Rey employs photography, video, collage, and even horticulture in her representation of a vanishing religious order of nuns. Paul Butler, who now lives in Montreal, joins video, drawing, writing, and sculpture in an installation that finds a way to record the personal dimensions of his life in a spare and elegant manner. Rodney LaTourelle, who works out of Berlin, will echo in concept and design the interior spaces of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the inside/outside nature of our urban inhabitation.

Northrop Frye, the Canadian literary and cultural theorist, famously said that the centre is where you are. Winnipeg artists believe that, but they also recognize that there are many points of self-definition inside that centre. Winnipeg Now embodies that richness of identity; its artists articulate issues of sexual and cultural difference. Kent Monkman, a gay, aboriginal artist uses the diorama format of the natural history museum to investigate his own background, just as Michael Dudeck links the conventions of museum display with ritual performance in his role as a queer artist witchdoctor. In a more intimate way, the collaborative team of Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millan will perform unconventional readings from a story-telling corner in the gallery.

Jennifer Stillwell’s large paintings occupy a space somewhere between modernism and cake decorating, while Daniel Barrow’s employment of old technologies to project images onto the walls of the gallery makes him absolutely new. Finally, Marcel Dzama’s fascination with Marcel Duchamp has turned his artful eye towards chess as a subject for art. Watch for the moves of his eleven foot tall turning Queen. Checkmate, all around!

Winnipeg Now will mark a new chapter in the ongoing story about how to make art outside the centre, a story that Winnipeg artists have been telling for over a century. The exhibition takes advantage of time; it builds on a past, in the present, to argue an artful future.Winnipeg Now is curated by Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings magazine , and art critic and professor Robert Enright.