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Abandoned shopping carts and broken bus shelters are a common sight in Winnipeg’s urban core. For some, they are signs of the systemic problems that face our community and are in constant need of cleaning in order to make the downtown more aesthetic and livable. For others, these things represent the various ways that people who live in the downtown make it their home.
This convergence of perspectives is the subjects of Junxions, the art exhibit on display right now at the Urban Shaman Gallery in the Exchange District. The exhibit, presented in association with the Flash Photographic Festival, invites viewers to consider the desire to “clean up” neighbourhoods as a colonial practice that erases homes and stories in the name of development.
The exhibit features two different installations that reflect on this colonial “cleaning”: "cARTS" by Marco Muller (aka Super-Empee) and "Bus Shack" by Zac Ironstand. The latter was compelled to respond to this idea through his art when he started reconnecting with his mother, who lived in a downtown hotel at the time.
“Seeing her life go unnoticed is what really pushed me to get this message out,” Ironstand says. “There’s more to the story, that these are people and the things that they went through are because of what Canada did. It starts to get a little bit frustrating when nobody really knows what you’re talking about. That’s kind of where I used my art to start spreading that voice and that message.”
Both Ironstand and Muller understand that the spirit of art can move things in people that mere words cannot. “It’s something that been passed on for generations as Indigenous artists,” says Muller. “We know and believe the spirit in art is special and powerful. So, that’s what got triggered into me with this art series.”
Muller’s "cARTS" is a project years in the making that catalogues shopping carts outside of their usual settings – left at the intersection of Higgins Avenue and Main Street in downtown Winnipeg or buried in the riverbanks of the Assiniboine.
“Shopping carts have a connection to virtually everybody,” he explains, highlighting the humanity that he tries to capture in each of these carts.
“A lot of the shopping carts that you see out in the public, they did at once belong to somebody that may have been carrying all their belongings or homes.”
The idea of a home is also at the core of "Bus Shack", as Ironstand fills broken shacks with various objects that accentuate the idea, from copper tea sets to religious iconography.
“When you have two separate cultures coming together, that interaction creates a whole new space,” says Ironstand, speaking less of the relationship that is created between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the gallery but of those with the privilege of home and those without it. “You have people who don’t have an address, they need a place to stay, and they resort to these bus shacks.”
“[The audience doesn’t] see them as a kid growing up. They don’t see the residential schools, that they had to go through all the displacement. And I really wanted to tie these two cultures together.”
Junxions runs at the Urban Shaman Gallery until June 14th. The gallery is open from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. For more information, visit the gallery’s website.