Work by artists from Flin Flon, Creighton, Cranberry Portage, Wanless and other northern communities is featured in a new provincial art show.
The Manitoba Arts Network opened up the 2022 Manitoba Rural and Northern Juried Arts Show late last month, featuring work from 36 different artists across Manitoba. That includes pieces from eight artists that were featured at the Northern Juried Art Show at the Flin Flon Community Hall earlier this year, including pieces by artists from Flin Flon, Creighton, Cranberry Portage, Wanless, The Pas and Thompson.
Those pieces include the reigning Best in Show from last summer’s show, Flin Flon sculptor Doug Dmytriw’s “More Horsemen”. The piece itself features four wooden figures on a bronze base, with each figure designed by Dmytriw in a similar style to Slavic religious iconography. The figures are meant to be, according to Dmytriw, a modern manifestation of the Biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse through the lens of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Tom Dubreuil’s “This is My Happy Face” is also featured in the show. The piece, a deeply detailed airbrush painting of a lynx, received first prize in the painting category at the northern show.
Ann Marin of Cranberry Portage entered the gallery with her northern watercolour category winner, “Desolation.” Marin’s sparse, minimalist piece shows an abstract landscape. Randy Beever’s piece “Chuck Wagon”, a hand-carved wooden model of the titular mode of western transport, won top spot in the three-dimensional category at the northern show earlier this year - it is also included in the provincial show.
Photographer Noelle Drimmie’s “Dear Baby Elliot 3”, a photograph showing a rocky outcrop near Flin Flon, was part of a series of works made by Drimmie in tribute of her own lost pregnancy, named after the name she had planned to give her lost son - Drimmie’s piece is also featured in the provincial gallery, having finished first in the photography category in the northern show earlier this year.
Wanless’ Shauna Ponask also entered the gallery with her “Water and the Wild” northern award winner “Calls of the Wild” - a set of moose-hide gauntlets trimmed with otter fur and custom beadwork with footprints, fir branches and loons.
Two other northern artists are also exhibited in the gallery - Thompson’s Jan Hall entered “Death Trap”, an embroidered piece showing an abandoned car from the 1930s, while The Pas’ James Dean has “Taxi Talk”, an oil painting showing a woman hailing a taxi in the rain.
The pieces are available to view online at artgallery.manitobaartsnetwork.ca.
