“Lost Space and its Remnants: The Hole in the Wall, A Retrospective”

The arcades in Paris are distinguished by a material juxtaposition: exposed iron frames hold together the glass-covered ceilings, beneath which storefronts line pedestrian streets laden with stone columns and arches. Walter Benjamin noted in his famously unfinished study of the arcades that modern innovations, such as the use of iron and glass, tended to reference older forms, like the columns and arches, out of context in “an attempt to master the new experiences of the city in the frame of the old ones” (Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, The MIT Press, 1991).

In 2013, curators David Churchill and Frank Livingstone were walking down an alley in their Winnipeg West End neighbourhood when they noticed a hole in the exterior brick wall of a grocery store that backed onto the alley. The hole wasn’t large enough to have been caused by a vehicle and was too exact to have been made by a blunt instrument. It was as if a brick had been carefully pulled out of place and discarded elsewhere in the alley. The curators apprehended the modest space as a gallery, which they named Hole in the Wall Gallery, as a site where they could place something new among the familiar urban decay that marks much of the city. It was an act which, for the curators, functioned as the deployment of a wish image for the future of the city. For Benjamin, the arcades could be seen as wish images of a 19th-century Paris that drew upon the mythic desires of the past to provide a revolutionary break from what was, using new materials like iron and glass, materials whose full potential had not yet been realized. Wish images, Susan Buck-Morss had written, “imbue the merely new with radical political meaning.”

The wish image of the Hole in the Wall Gallery was far more modest. The site of the gallery called up the mythical days of neighbourhood brick-and-mortar stores frequented by residents who walked their familiar circuits, and the size of this micro-gallery implied an opposition to the scale of the high-rise condos being constructed in the adjacent downtown, easily visible from the West End. These desires for a return to the past intermingled with the preferred materials of construction for the gallery’s wish image—the materials used for the oil paintings on canvas, the drawings on card stock and the sculptures they displayed there.

Some of the artists’ work integrated the natural materials of the urban landscape of a city whose attempts to be any kind of commercial or financial centre reach only as high as record sales of Slurpees. Artist Leala Hewak gathered, folded and placed those colourful cups in the Hole in the Wall, where they appeared looking like trash used to plug a hole. Erica Mendritzki’s oil painting of a discarded condom, an object carefully avoided while walking, confronted the viewer with the reality of alleyways, poorly lit streets and other low foot-traffic areas. This was seeing the neighbourhood as spaces rife with street harassment where strangers witness to such confrontations would tend to ignore them rather than intervene.

Books painted by Adam Bratt piled with their spines facing out; Cliff Eyland’s illustrations on card stock leaning upright against the brick; Cam Bush’s stacked cards featuring a photograph and a Craigslist “missed connection” post on the back and Frank Livingstone’s “gift cards,” which are cards adorned with plastic lace and glitter, in a small pile—these works recalled the magazine racks and stacks of newspapers sold on the other side of the gallery wall, inside the grocery store. But in the alley, the curators eschewed the commercial relationship by encouraging gallery attendees and strangers alike to help themselves to the work on display. When the work had been taken or was blown away by a strong wind, the empty space that was left between exhibitions itself became something to be observed (the original space left by a missing brick now appearing new again), and provided a view of the skeletal edifice of brick construction that features heavily in Winnipeg’s older neighbourhoods. Viewing the installation shots lining a wall in the Library Gallery at the retrospective, you noticed the weathering of the bricks throughout the seasons, the summer sun washing away any subtle variations of hue or the moisture from a rainstorm or melting snow absorbed into parts of the brick contrasting with the lighter, dry pieces. A few weeks prior to the closing of the gallery (when the store owners replaced the missing brick), a graffiti artist had spray painted their tag on the brick directly above the hole, perhaps their own wish image, and the exhibitions in the following weeks competed with this now permanent installation. In its new location—a wood box fixed to the alleyway fence behind the curators’ West End home—Scott Leroux’s Sculpey sculpture of a man building a brick wall referred back to the old location’s forced closing.

The retrospective also displayed remnants of work installed at the Hole in the Wall. That some pieces remained as the artist intended, others destroyed or in varying stages of decay, and the rest not on display at all is another reminder of the gallery’s deliberate vulnerability to both the elements and the people who approached, touched, played with, removed or destroyed the work, all reflecting the curators’ never considering preventative security measures.

At a time when mainstream art is displayed in pristine white-walled galleries that are themselves intimidating spaces to the uninitiated, and where gallerists are preoccupied with commercial necessities, Hole in the Wall placed art in a space where there was a temporary suspension of hierarchies, where anyone could stop to look, and to think about the work as they continued along their way. In A Philosophy of Walking (Verso Books, 2014), Frédéric Gros explains that while walking “the body’s monotonous duty liberates thought” and “one is not obliged to think like this or that or like this or like that.” The gallery wasn’t a destination for everyone. For some it was a discovery, a disruption in the familiar by something new and unexpected, and along their walk they could consider it for themselves. ❚

“Lost Space and its Remnants: The Hole in the Wall, A Retrospective” was exhibited at Library Gallery, Winnipeg, from June 5 to June 28, 2015.

Ben Wood is a writer living in Winnipeg, Canada. He is an Associate Editor at thewinnipegreview.com.