Don Gill - Erratic Space Winnipeg: City workers shack

Don Gill at the Winnipeg Art Gallery

ERRATIC SPACE: DON GILL May 1 to July 1, 2007

As a visitor to a new city, how does one experience what it is all about? Some people visit museums and art galleries, others take in sporting events and shopping. How can someone from "away" truly get a meaningful impression about what defines and what is unique to a particular place? How long does this process take and how can these impressions be recorded, noted, and shared? Most people create a photo album or scrapbook, some video record, and others diarize,but generally these materials, the residue of a visit, are only for personal use. Does the information change when this activity is made public? These are all questions I mulled over when I invited Lethbridge artist Don Gill to Winnipeg. Over the last three years Gill has taken these informal and personal modes of investigations of a place and pushed them into a thoughtful and even perhaps challenging arena.

During his month-long residency at The Winnipeg Art Gallery, Gill will turn the Mezzanine Gallery into a laboratory of sorts. His experiments will focus on the city of Winnipeg, in particular its visual identity. Using a predetermined methodology, each day the gathering of information will begin anew as he takes different extended walking tours through the city. Using his work space at the Gallery to arrange, organize, and archive his findings, Gill will be available to visitors to engage in conversations that will add to his data and perhaps influence his hypothesis on this urban landscape that is in constant flux. Through the accumulation of information, presented in a variety of formats, such as scrapbooks, photographs, drawings, and videos, Gill will map out points of intersection, continuity and incongruous habitation that are unique to experiencing Winnipeg.

Don Gill received his BFA from the University of Victoria and did his graduate work at the California Institute of the Arts. Since 2000 he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. He has exhibited his work extensively across Canada and the United States. Erratic Space was performed at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI, in 2005.

Mary Reid Curator, Contemporary Art and Photography

Don Gill - Erratic Space Winnipeg

Thursday, 10 May 2007

May 1

Don Gill at ILIRI

Don Gill at the Winnipeg Art Gallery

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