Description

Scanned slides documenting the exhibition MENTORING/manitoba artists for women's art (MAWA): a catalytic situation. This show was facilitated by Sandra Vida [Tivy] and Sylvia Ziemann, and featured work by: Eleanor Bond, Shirley Brown, Sheila Butler, Aganetha Dyck, Bev Pike, Reva Stone, Diana Thorneycroft, and Diane Whitehouse. MAWA: a catalytic situation was displayed at The New Gallery's location at 722 - 11 Ave SW. It ran from February 6 to 23, 1991.

MAWA was founded in 1983, when Diane Whitehouse, Sheila Butler, and other artists affiliated with Plug/In Inc. began to create initiatives that would address problems faced by female art producers. The fundamental objective of the organization was to create an accessible support network for women artists––one that encouraged critical dialogue and provided assistance to female artists to enhance their artistic skills and professional goals. The Mentor Program, which began in 1985 and continues today, brings together established women artists with those of less experience. This exhibition featured work by some of the women involved with the program as Mentors or Mentees.

Eleanor Bond's large un-stretched oil painting, Later Some Industrial Refugees Form Communal Settlements in a Logged Valley in B.C., depicted a fictional anti-Utopian city. The garish colours illustrated a futuristic vision of the possible consequences of our destructive culture. Bond's work often depicts topographical cityscapes that dance between painting and architectural design. She merges urban and natural environments that challenge the viewer's sense of what is real and what is imaginary. Bond was involved in the Mentor Program as a Mentor to two younger artists in 1986.

Shirley Brown was a Participant/Mentee of MAWA in 1988; her success exemplifies the program's main goals. Before her involvement with the program, Brown was isolated on a farm near Deloraine, Manitoba, where she practiced painting as a hobby. Since her participation, Brown has made a serious commitment to her work and has participated in several group and solo exhibitions. The painting that was included in this exhibition displays a familiar rural prairie landscape with an unexpected insertion of a Drive-In theatre screen. In Brown’s own words: “Movies fascinate me in their ability to transport the audience into another reality. I somehow hope my paintings will do the same.”

Sheila Butler––an initiator of MAWA––works primarily in drawing and painting. Her work depicts human figures in an ambiguous space and relationship. She describes her work as a “progression toward narrative and narrative associations… In the painting Out of Breath, I propose a knowledge of our environment growing from our own bodies. The figure inhales, exhales, and requires mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as the colour fades. The landscape shades from green through brown; the oxygen-depleted atmosphere and the body are parallel.”

Aganetha Dyck participated as a mentor in 1985 and 1988. Prior to making a full time commitment to art, Dyck arranged her artistic interests around her role as a mother and wife. Her works are based on observation and responding to society and the world around her. The works included in this exhibition transformed familiar objects––such as handbags and record sleeves––into slightly erotic sculptural forms through the application of several layers of wax.

Bev Pike’s large paintings explore the bedroom as a site for sleep, meditation, privacy, love, and relationships. In Chambre de Douleur… Pike depicted a cropped view of a bed covered with a patterned quilt. The paintings in this series often contained signs of human existance, indicated either by a cropped human figure or by subtle implications. Pike was born in Regina and was involved with artist-run centers in Edmonton before moving to Winnipeg in 1988; she was a mentor in 1989 and has also served on the board of directors.

Reva Stone was mentored under Aganetha Dyck in 1985; she was one of the first to participate in the program. Her piece A Lot Like You was a photograph-based work that dealt with “ideas about… culturally-defined concepts of identity.” Using images from advertising and popular culture––in this case, a small plastic doll named "A lot like you"––Stone reflected on the power the media has on the shaping of the individual, especially women.

In Diana Thorneycroft’s untitled photograph series, she combined fetish objects, toys, and images that invoked memories from childhood. To capture a subconscious dream-like image, Thorneycroft shot her photographs in complete darkness, randomly exposing objects with a hand-held flashlight. Some elements in the image were sharp and in focus while others were vague and blurred. In the artist's own words, “The blackness… becomes a metaphor for the unknown; the dark side of the psyche that remains hidden from consciousness.” Thorneycroft was a Mentor in both 1986 and 1988.

Diane Whitehouse was also an initiator of MAWA. Her large paintings, which lie between abstraction and representation, imply both interior and exterior space. The depiction of these incomplete enclosures suggested notions of freedom and entrapment. In discussing her work, Whitehouse explained that it “isn’t directly feminist, I’m a painter and I’m a woman. The painting comes out of a kind of destruction of modernism. I was schooled in that––in abstract expressionism. I’m involved in a re-thinking of that, and a re-thinking of the landscape as body.”

For more information on MAWA, click here

Description Sources
Mentoring (catalogue), published by The New Gallery.

MENTORING––manitoba artist for women's art: a catalytic situation, The New Gallery Press Release

Moffat, Charles, "Eleanor Bond," Art History Archive - Canadian Art, 2007, The Lilith Gallery Network, 7 July 2009.
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/Eleanor-Bond.html