Winnipeg artists are collectively playing the numbers game. In the past, the city established a reputation for producing individual artists of singular talent -- Ivan Eyre, Don Reichert, Wanda Koop, William Eakin and Eleanor Bond are all painters and photographers whose careers have been solo affairs. But recently, with the meteoric success of the seven-member Royal Art Lodge as an example, Winnipeg artists have been banding together to form associations in which their collective identity is as important as their individual one.
The 10-member Ladies of the Standard Movie Theatre have been collaborating on events and projects for two years and now the latest artists' group, Two Six, has hit the street running. I should say hit the street pedalling. Two Six (as in the size of a bottle of whisky) is a core association of seven artists, most of whom have been into graffiti, and all of whom continue to participate in what they call "party-bike nail-bombing." On these excursions, weather permitting, the members of Two Six pack art pieces, beer, hammers and nails, and go riding off to find congenial outdoor locations where they can "install" their art. Those favoured locations aren't galleries, but telephone poles, signs, fences and corners of urban buildings. Their interventions are most often subtle, and always an improvement on what they find.
On Friday night in the former annex space of the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art and now an independent gallery called The Annex, Two Six opened a self-curated, indoor show called A La Plancher. The rough translation means "Let's Party", and the large crowd that came to the opening did just that. Two Six includes turntablists in its extended membership, so the evening's music was provided by DJ Brace, Unease and the Village Idiots. Two Six is a group of friends -- Ian August, Roger Crait, Shaun Morin, Melanie Rocan, Cyrus Smith, Fred Thomas and David Wityk -- in their mid- to late-20s, who have a particular attitude about being in the world that informs their art-making.
Call it poetic postpunk formalism. Smith, for example, finds much of the material for his work in dumpsters and on the street. In the exhibition, he has included three of his "collections"; gloves, balls and brooms. This last piece is a upside-down bouquet of straw brooms, some with broken handles, most with worn bristles, leaning together against a wall in a corner of the gallery. It is a poignant work, a quality which is visible throughout his various gatherings. He also includes a wall of notes people have left for him in his studio space. These messages create a fragmented diary that is both intimate and ephemeral. The sensibility that emerges from it is that of an unusually talented minimalist, lyric at one moment; hard-assed in the next.
That combination of aesthetic tough love is most evident in the work of Fred Thomas, the oldest member of Two Six and the collective's most experienced graffiti artist. He has retired from the street and now works as a programmer at Winnipeg's Graffiti Gallery. In A La Plancher, he has organized a single installation called Neglect out of 20 separate pieces. (The overall dimensions of this wall piece are approximately 2½ feet in height by 30 feet in length). His subjects are invariably disenfranchised street people observed in the street, while his surfaces are found on the street -- crushed oil cans, pieces of wood and cardboard, discarded street signs.
Thomas's ability to seamlessly match surface with image is remarkable, as is his technique. He uses a can of spray paint with more finesse and skill than a lot of artists use their hands. One piece shows a nervous-looking man occupying a No Parking sign. Thomas positions the figure to obscure three of the letters, so the message reads "NO KING", a telling truth in a world in which neglect is the operating principle.
Melanie Rocan is the only female member of the group -- and the youngest -- and she casts a delicate shadow across the testosterone-sprayed landscape inhabited by her fellow two-sixers. Her work is mixed in its media: an assortment of stretched-fabric pieces, luscious oil and acrylic paintings and darling water colours occupy different parts of the gallery. What they have in common is a cheeky whimsicality where a dress is saved from prettiness by solid clothespins that hold it in place, or where the barest whisper of a wine glass is abused by the contents of a gorgeous ashtray smeared on the same filmy table top. And her tiny watercolours -- which she considers paintings -- are confections. Her birthday cake, or the gramophone with the pink-frilled cone -- a play on the notion of "her mistress's voice" -- are irresistibly engaging.
So is the rest of the exhibition. Shaun Morin continues to paint well beyond his years; his oil called Keyhole is elegantly awkward, as if he were peeking into a room occupied by the late Philip Guston. Roger Crait peeks in at Jacques Cousteau; his 26 Fish/Metis/Logo.1 is a fish as big as a minisub. Ian August's paintings are the surprise of the exhibition; odd, quirky, even creepy, and entirely inexplicable. In Self- Titled he holds a rabbit in one hand while behind him are a pair of creatures that look like refugees from Dr. Seuss.
In another called Add Thirty-Two, a trio of British working-class beer guzzlers carry pints, hammers and nails on what must be an ambulatory, English variation of a nail-bombing adventure. August's works are occasionally muddy but they are also unfailingly fascinating. The whole exhibition (which continues at the Annex gallery, not surprisingly, until Dec. 26) has that quality. David Wityk's work is a collection of clothes that he has hung at the back of the gallery, as if garments could be the raw material for a new category of sedimentary layering. The piece is called Endless, and as a viewer you want to watch as each future layer is added. That's how you generally feel about Two Six. They are the newest kids on the block in a Winnipeg street already occupied by notable individual artists. They are making a lot of noise. But on the evidence of A La Plancher, it's easy to see that their real sound is a barbaric yawp that is fast arcing toward refinement.