Kerfuffle on Main

It’s been five years since Ryan Pollard and his team restored the Fortune Block on Main Street to its former glory, and the building is almost all leased up — except for the airy, street-level space at 226 Main St.

Pollard could have left it sitting vacant until he found a permanent tenant; instead, he’s transformed into a pop-up art gallery. And May is booked with exhibitions, revealing an appetite for professional spaces for artists to show their work.

This weekend, the gallery is inhabited by Pretty, a group show featuring works by the Frost Shield Kerfuffle, a Winnipeg collective composed of artists Michael Boss, Timothy Brown, Kelly-Jo Dorvault, Patricia Eschuk, Kenneth Harasym, Chris Simonite and Diana Thorneycroft.

Guest artists Parminder Obhi and Opeyemi Olukotun also have work featured in the exhibition, which is on view until Sunday.

Thorneycroft previously had art featured at the Fortune Block as part of a show organized by multimedia artist James Culleton in December.

“I walked in, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this space is fantastic — the Kerfuffles should show here,’” Thorneycroft says.

It’s a rainy Thursday morning and Pollard, along with Thorneycroft and fellow collective members Boss and Simonite, and Brendan Michal Heshka, whose solo exhibition, Words in Paint, will be shown from May 10 to 21, are gathered at 226 Main St.

The walls, animated now by the freshly mounted works of Pretty, have been painted a crisp, gallery white. Track lighting has been installed.

But the gallery is temporary. It doesn’t have a name. And in a few months, it will likely be transformed into something else.

“It is a wonderful gallery space, definitely,” Pollard agrees. “I was excited to put artwork in here; we’ve done a couple of pop-up things here prior to this, and they all turned out great.

“The entire time that we’ve been doing those pop-ups, we’ve also been trying to lease this unit to have a more stable long-term tenant. It’s been a challenging thing to do. We’ve been trying to lease this space since the end of 2019, basically.”

“The entire time that we’ve been doing those pop-ups, we’ve also been trying to lease this unit to have a more stable long-term tenant. It’s been a challenging thing to do”–Ryan Pollard

So, when Thorneycroft came along, it felt like a good fit. Pollard committed to doing a short-term lease, three months at a time.

“I was very conflicted over that, I should say. I knocked around the idea of trying to do a gallery here. At the end of the day, I just decided that I had enough going on with other parts of my personal and professional life that it just felt like too much,” he says.

Pollard has since lined up a prospective tenant to take over the unit for a different use in late summer, but until then, 226 Main St. will be filled with art.

Named for both a Manitoba car-window covering of yore and the politest of Canadian arguments, the Frost Shield Kerfuffle began as a way to build some community around making art, which is often a solitary — and sometimes lonely — pursuit. The group would meet and discuss and offer critiques.

“The key, I think, to our collective is that we don’t take ourselves seriously. Our work, yes. But when we get together, we have as much fun as possible, as you can tell by the name,” Thorneycroft says.

Pretty is the collective’s fourth exhibition following We have nothing in common except some of us are nice (cre8ery, 2018), Revolting! (The Edge Gallery, 2019) and Damaged Landscapes (Prairie Fusion, 2022).

Pretty, the adjective, is kind of a slur in the art world; no one wants their works described — or perhaps more accurately dismissed — as “pretty.”

It has many different definitions and uses, depending on context — “That’s so pretty!” versus “That’s pretty strange” — and, while all the pieces in Pretty diverge wildly in terms of style and interpretation, there’s an overarching idea that if you scratch at the surface of pretty, you’ll often find weirdness and ugliness just underneath.

Following Pretty is Heshka’s Words in Paint, featuring a series of 12 paintings of covers of first-edition books rendered in everything from gold leaf to spray paint.

“I’m making what I call a conceptual reading room,” says Heska, who recently moved back to Winnipeg after living and studying in Europe and was looking to make some connections.

“I was a bit isolated in my profession,” he says.

Heshka knew of Pollard via many mutual friends and was interested in the work he had done rehabbing the Fortune Block. Pollard visited Heshka’s studio, Heshka visited the space on Main Street, and the pair started working together.

Having a visible, street-level gallery on Main Street feels significant, especially considering the area’s losses. Fire destroyed the Main Street home of Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and the Edge Gallery & Urban Art Centre in December. Four years before that, fire gutted the building that housed many artists’ studios on Jarvis Avenue.

The Fortune Block will host five shows featuring more than a dozen artists over the next three months, but Pollard is demure about his supporting role in Winnipeg’s art scene.

“I don’t really feel like it is a massive support. It’s a discounted rental rate and we’ll do a short-term ‘lease,’ if that’s even what you want to call it. Like, we’re not giving it away. But it provides a space to put up art,” he says.

The artists in the Frost Shield Kerfuffle Collective, however, might disagree.

“It is a huge support because it is so difficult to find any decent space to show artwork in the city. Don’t diminish that. It’s really important,” Boss says.

“Art is not a charity. Art is not a community service, necessarily. I would say Ryan’s participating in culture with this space. He’s not trying to hold it up or give something — he’s participating and it’s a mutual participation”–Brendan Michal Heshka

“I also appreciate what Ryan’s trying to convey there,” Heshka says. “Art is not a charity. Art is not a community service, necessarily. I would say Ryan’s participating in culture with this space. He’s not trying to hold it up or give something — he’s participating and it’s a mutual participation.”

In fact, at Heshka’s encouragement, Pollard himself is putting up an exhibition at the end of the month.

“For the past eight or nine years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about a man named Ernie Wilson,” he says.

Ernest (Ernie) Wilson was a Winnipeg artist who died in 1987. Pollard grew up around one of his paintings: a surrealist 1974 work called The Hysteria of a Sunny Day, which features a wild-eyed carousel horse loose in a prairie field that hung at his grandparents’ house.

“And so, I set out trying to figure out who he was, basically, and I built a little inventory of his work,” says Pollard (who is still looking for more art, by the way, so if you’re sitting on a Wilson, get in touch at the email below).

“He was essentially unsearchable. There was really nothing written about him, even though I think he’s an outstanding painter. I just felt like he was, in some ways, sort of forgotten about.”

Pollard tracked down Wilson’s brother and his family to learn more about Ernie, and they generously donated some additional works on paper. Those pieces, plus 20 or so canvases, will compose Silent Fields: Art By Ernest G. Wilson (1933-1987), which will be on view from May 28 to June 8 and will be the first solo exhibition of Wilson’s work in decades.

Two more shows are on the books at 226 Main St., including an exhibition of paintings by Lilian Bonin and Liv Valmestad, along with ceramic pieces by Charlene Brown from June 12 to 19, and a group show featuring Susan Turner, Adelle Rawluk and others from July 23 to 29.

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Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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