At seven, Matea Radic and her parents left their home in Sarajevo, fleeing the Yugoslav Wars. She and her mother boarded the last bus out of the city before the siege began in 1992, and her father escaped two years later to join them in Winnipeg.

Today, October 26th, Matea’s show 7 opens at the Graffiti Gallery. Her series of paintings and drawings examine “the effects displacement had on [her] as a child and a person.” As Matea talks about her memories of life before the war, grenades, the family that stayed behind, it’s clear this pain, decades old, is still fresh. That’s the funny thing about trauma; it can break the surface before you even know it’s there, won’t subside until it’s ready. It keeps its own time.

I chat and snap photos with Matea as she works on the focal piece of the show: a large mural where a four-legged black beast Matea calls a hole maker looms over an abundance of food, plants, animals, and household objects. The image, like each of the pieces in Matea’s show, is playful, childlike, and nightmarish.

Michelle PantingOctober 26, 2017Graffiti Galleryart, refugees, Matea Radic, Graffiti Gallery, DisplacementComment

Sarah Anne Johnson on Family Trauma, Psychedelics, and Art

Sarah Anne Johnson greets me at back door to the building that houses her studio in the West Exchange. We climb the stairs, chatting about our weeks and the artist talk at the old Globe Cinema she plans to attend after our interview. We enter the studio, and Sarah shows me around. On one side, large photographs taken at music festivals hang over tables of paints and other supplies. On the other, Sarah’s constructed a large cave with the help of her assistant as a continuation of her project House on Fire. A large handmade dummy rests on a table off to the side. Sarah props him up and tells me she’s had a difficult time trying to source fake eye balls. The last ones she ordered were pricey and they still don’t look real enough.

Since 2008, Sarah has been making work about her grandmother, Velma Orlikow, who was one of Doctor Cameron’s patients in the MKUltra experiments during the mid-1950’s. As treatment for postnatal depression, Velma underwent electroshock therapy, injections of LSD, and medically-induced sleep. Later, it was discovered that the entire project had been covertly funded by the CIA, and was part of an ongoing investigation into methods of interrogation and torture.

House on Fire in 2009 was Sarah’s first body of work about her grandmother’s experiences. The show included family photographs, newspaper clippings, bronze figurines and a surreal dollhouse. Since then, Sarah’s been constructing life-size replicas of each room in the dollhouse, making video, and sometimes reconstructing and displaying the models in galleries, putting on live performances inside them. The first was Hospital Hallway in 2015, followed by The Kitchen in 2016. Now she’s working on The Cave, a reconstruction of a room in the centre of the House on Fire with no windows or doors, where two figures dance. One of Sarah’s current projects is shooting a video in the cave, where she plays her grandmother, dancing with the dummy whose eyeballs aren’t right yet.

Returning to the other side of the studio, away from the cave and tables strewn with limbs and partial constructions of human figures, feels instantly cheerier. The walls are a brilliant white and photographs beckon with colour. Sarah likes to joke that, “If someone didn’t know that this was all one artist, they’d think it was two separate artists that didn’t even like each other or respect each other’s work.”

We sit down in two comfortably worn second-hand chairs and begin talking more about Sarah’s projects.

artMichelle PantingJuly 13, 2017art, Sarah Anne Johnson, drugs, family Comments

Gabrielle Funk: Psychopomp at Gurevich Fine Art

It’s late March, one week prior to the opening of Gabrielle Funk’s show Psychopomp at Gurevich Fine Art, when I climb the stairs to her new apartment on Assinaboine. Gabrielle’s spent more than a hundred hours making points over the last two weeks.

Her breathtaking pointillist self-portraits feature human figures and animals, born out from what she calls an “obsessive” practice.

The concept for the show has, according to Gabrielle, “come to fruition over the last few months.” Originally, she had planed a more conceptual, structured show based on a book she read this past fall. But after a recent parting-of-ways with her partner and the studio space they shared in their home, the show took a different direction. Psychopomp “emerged in a very natural way out of a pretty raw, transitional emotional state,” Gabrielle says. Each piece serves as “a sort of spiritual identity” simultaneously representing Gabrielle herself as well as a kind of spiritual guide through a state of transition “from one self to another.”

Gabrielle busies herself, making tea, adding more detail to the last self-portrait to join the show, pulling old work from an antique trunk, shooing her cats away from me and my allergic nose. We sit down to talk more about her work.

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