After Winter, Before Spring

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Christine Kirouac, "One-sided," 2018

graphite on paper, 40" x 18"

The visual landscape of a Winnipeg winter does not seem likely to inspire the average eye. But artists have long found meaning and solace in the city’s most frigid season.

Winnipeg’s Christine Kirouac and Doug Smith team up for their own take on the theme in Après l’hiver, avant le printemps / After Winter, Before Spring, on view at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones in Winnipeg until July 27.

The artists, who have known each other for more than three decades, investigate, celebrate and examine nature amidst urban sprawl using the metaphor of the brief time when life begins to awake from hibernation but is not yet fully lucid.

Kirouac, who recently returned to Winnipeg after seven years in the United States, uses the suburban neighbourhood of Whyte Ridge – where her mother lives – as a jumping off point for thoughtful drawings on paper. 

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Christine Kirouac, "Spring, Snow, Cloud," 2019

graphite on paper, 22" x 30"

Her loving treatment evokes nature returning to animation through a murky half-life. The stark white background of her drawings of trees are haunting, accurately reflecting a Winnipeg winter, where everything is overshadowed by a suffocating blanket of snow.

Mazes of branches on mangled trees with pebbles at their feet come awake. A slumped-over weeping caragana sits quietly in one room, the dismembered body of a crow in the next. Kirouac’s delicate and painstaking marks make these images seem luxurious. 

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Doug Smith, "A March Moment," 2018

graphite on paper, 85” x 100”

Smith’s heavy and layered landscapes explore a different aspect of the same theme, imagining the collision of the natural and the constructed, as seen from above and within. His large drawings beautifully overwhelm the space.

Plumes of wispy graphite billow from abstracted rows of houses in one work, while heavy repetitive dark lines create a visual plane that butts up against a gridded modern topography. His work hints of the power of the natural dance around land divisions with the soft urgency of memory. 

The works seem to approach the question of how people can reacquaint themselves with a landscape whose elements feel familiar, but whose cartography has shifted and is foreign. ■

Après l’hiver, avant le printemps / After Winter, Before Spring is on view at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones from May 30 to July 27, 2019.