Eleanor Bond, AA Bronson, Shezad Dawood, Adrian Stimson and Lori Blondeau

In November, 2010, Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA marked the move to its new purpose-built structure with an ambitious slate of four shows. Clearly, the organization was starting as it means to go on, showcasing an edgy mix of work by local, national and international artists.

The Buhler Centre, designed for partners Plug In ICA and the University of Winnipeg by David Penner Architect, Peter Sampson Architecture Studio and DIN Projects, houses in the Plug In spaces a research area, a shop and a floor of flexible exhibition spaces. With unexpected visual angles and voyeuristic peepholes, the design underlines the pleasures of looking. And Plug In’s first burst of programming offered a lot to look at. Fittingly, for works signalling the opening of a new space, some of the art obliquely explored the notion of place.

“We are the revolution” by AA Bronson, the last surviving member of General Idea, consists of three photo-based serigraphs. Naked life-size portraits of the artist, the images are enigmatic remnants of a secret “performance,” part of a collaborative project with Peter Hobbs called Invocation of the Queer Spirits. There’s something of General Idea’s conceptual mix of social criticism and drop-dead glamour in these sparkling, diamond-dusted documents. Bronson’s mystical bent comes through in the ritual. According to curator Anthony Kiendl, Invocation is a hybrid combo of ceremonial magic, gay heart circles, 19th-century spiritualist practice and shamanism. But, as with the ancient mystery religions, the actual form of the ritual remains unknown—the photograph was taken before it began and there were no witnesses.

“Revolution” is site-specific: the images are placed at precisely the spot where the original ceremony took place—in what was the asbestos-ridden United Army Surplus building, a typically scruffy Winnipeg landmark that was torn down to make way for the Buhler Centre. (In this notoriously nostalgic town, it seems right that a shiny new structure should be haunted by an image of the old one.)

“Putting the WILD Back into the West” by Adrian Stimson and Lori Blondeau up-ends the triumphalist myths of the Canadian West with a subversive post-colonial take on gender, sex and power. Blondeau, a Saskatoon-based Cree/Salteaux/ Métis artist, dresses up as Belle Sauvage, a cowgirl who channels a bit of Doris Day in the cross-dressing cult movie Calamity Jane, while Stimson, a member of the Siksika Nation who now works in Saskatoon, takes on the persona of Buffalo Boy, resplendent in lipstick and fishnet stockings. The duo spoofs Western stereotypes—Mountie and outlaw, Indian maiden and saloon girl, priest and school marm. And by comically offering up fake Wild West spectacle and buckskin tourist-shop kitsch, Blondeau and Stimson lampoon the commodification of First Nations history and artifacts.

The show kicked off with an interactive performance, an art form that gains its power from the fact that things can go either way. The night of November sixth really cooked, with audience members lining up to participate, grabbing costumes and props to pose with Blondeau and Stimson in front of a painted backdrop that mimicked the look of old photographs. These photographs will eventually become part of a cumulative installation that records four years of cross-Canada performances, from 2006 to 2010.

Even though it’s a travelling Wild West show, the work still manages to be site-specific. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind Stimson and Blondeau look across the street to the Beaux Arts grandeur of The Bay department store. Some of the duo’s props and outfits purposely reference the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose 340-year-old roots in the fur trade drove exploration and settlement in the Canadian North and West.

“A Mystery Play” by Shezad Dawood also responds to nearby structures, in this case the Legislative Building, the dome of which can be seen from Plug In along the line of Memorial Boulevard. The London-born artist’s 2010 summer residency at Plug In resulted in a feverish 13-minute video that uses key Winnipeg locations to suggest a kinky alternative civic history. Drawing on the elaborate created mythologies of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and the anachronistic black-and-white look of Guy Maddin’s imagined Winnipeg, Dawood references Masonic symbolism, burlesque and magic, and 1920s vaudeville performances at the Pantages Playhouse, which all come together in a kinky initiation rite set at the Legislature’s Pool of the Black Star.

Finally, senior Winnipeg artist Eleanor Bond almost seems to be playing against expectations with her perversely fascinating new show “Mountain of Shame.” Known for monumental architectural landscapes—as seen in her highly influential series “Social Centres” that showed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1990—Bond features a couple of large-scale pieces, including a gorgeous work made up of vibrating horizontal stripes that resemble geological strata. But mostly, the show scales right down to enigmatic painted objects and small, washy, organic abstractions.

The mood is intensely introspective, as Bond examines inward-looking emotions of shame, fear and guilt. Some of the pieces could be viewed as dark smears of excrement—the paint still looks wet. Other works, amorphous Styrofoam shapes covered in layers of bright pigment, are hard to read: they veer between silly, almost Seuss-like whimsy and something much more sinister. All of them reinforce the substance of paint—some of the 3D objects resemble blown-up brushstrokes. In “Mountain,” Bond emphasizes embodied experience—at times almost uncomfortably physical—in the face of the increasingly decentred, disembodied digital age. This is perhaps her own quiet affirmation of a sense of time and place. ❚

“Mountain of Shame,” curated by Helga Pakasaar, was exhibited at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg from November 10, 2010, to January 2, 2011. “A Mystery Play,” curated by Anthony Kiendl and Sara Raza, “Putting the WILD Back in the West: Buffalo Boy and Belle Sauvage” and “We are the revolution” were exhibited at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg from November 10 to December 19, 2010.

Alison Gillmor is the Pop culture columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and often writes on visual arts and film.