Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, "One Gay City" (detail), 1997, transit shelter ad campaign. (photo courtesy of the artists)
Winnipeg transit shelters will be more welcoming this winter with the addition of a public art installation by the collaborative duo Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan.
Their installation, One Queer City, builds on the premises of One Gay City, a never-installed 1997 public art installation for transit shelters that featured three prints that each featured a smiling Winnipeg resident and the slogan “Winnipeg: One Gay City!”
The somewhat facetious claim was aimed at Susan Thompson, the mayor at the time, who refused to officially sanction Gay Pride Day.
The works will be installed as intended from Nov. 16 to Feb. 14.
"Public perceptions and attitudes toward gay people have shifted so significantly over the last two decades that it seems strange these images would arouse such controversy," Blair Fornwald, the project's curator, says in a statement from the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery, the originating institution, along with the PLATFORM centre for photographic + media arts.
"Presenting them now makes this shift in attitudes toward queerness visible, and in doing so, underscores the radical potential of this work, and of art in general – by imaging more just and equitable realities, it can actually help will that reality into being."
One Queer City also includes bus shelter ads created by an intergenerational cohort of queer photo-based artists from Winnipeg whose works represent a range of intersectional identities.
"Brought together, they remind the viewer that there is no one queer experience, no homogeneous queer community, and that access and privilege is not granted equally or simultaneously to all."
The artists take various approaches. Some, like Dempsey and Millan, present carefully staged performative photographs, while others take candid snapshots or capture sitters with traditional portraiture.
One Queer City features work by Jean Borbridge, Mahlet Cuff, Dayna Danger, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Larry Glawson, and Ally Gonzalo.
Source: Gallery 1C03