POWER PLAY EXHIBITION
Gallery celebrates hockey in art
Instead of keeping its sticks on the ice, the Art Gallery of Windsor has hung them on the walls. Power Play: Hockey in Canadian Contemporary Art, a new exhibit all about the beloved national pastime, looks at the laced-up sport as a slice of what it means tobe Canadian.
“It’s accessible in that it’s hockey, but when you come through the door there’s so much more to learn,” said the gallery ’s curator of contemporary art, Jaclyn Meloche, an avid Ottawa Senators fan. The exhibit features work by 14 artists from across Canada, including three from Windsor, as well as two historical pieces on loan from the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto: an NHL special-edition cereal box with Gordie Howe pictured on the front, and a mask worn by Jacques Plante, the first NHL goaltender to regularly don the face protection in regulation play. “I hope that this is a platform to reach out to new audiences, new demographics, new age groups — families who spend their weekends in hockey arenas,” said Meloche, whose twin brother played the game growing up. “Hockey is a demanding sport on the family. Here’s an opportunity to explore that sport in a different context, and to learn more about why we play hockey, and why this is Canada’s official national winter sport.”
On one wall, Quebec artist Marc-Antoine Phaneuf arranged 2,500 hockey cards in the style of an abstract painter to portray the idealization and idolization of players. Across the room, artist and hockey player Liz Pead mimicked Tom Thomson and other Group of Seven-inspired landscapes by stapling pieces of her recycled hockey equipment — goalie pads, gloves, jerseys, sticks — artfully to canvases large and small. “One of the things I am dedicated to as a curator is material culture and the objects, the things that art is made of,” said Meloche. Old kids’ jerseys and hockey skates were on display around a corner.
On a slightly elevated platform in the middle of the exhibit sat 22 hockey bags, each containing sections of the Canadian AIDS Memo- rial Quilt. Composed of more than 600 three-by-six foot panels each representing someone who died of AIDS and HIV-related illnesses, the quilt has been stored in the hockey bags in the Canadian AIDS Society offices in Ottawa since the 1990s, Meloche said. American artist Hazel Meyer brought the closed bags containing almost enough quilt to cover a regulation rink back into the public eye for the first time in over two decades, but the quilt is too fragile to reveal.
“These are stories that have been omitted from Canadian history,” said Meloche. “Through hockey now we get to have a conversation, and I think that’s the most powerful thing that art can do.”
A wall by the hockey bags lists the names of those represented by the hidden quilt pieces.
A second show new to the gallery is a solo exhibition containing two films by Belgian multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez. The first, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), a hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9/11, and the second, Blue Orchids, a double portrait of two experts on opposite ends of the global arms trade.
Both exhibits open to the public at the Art Gallery of Windsor — celebrating its 75th year — and run until May 12.
After it leaves Windsor, Power Play will tour to galleries across Canada for around three years.