Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

I make no secret of the fact that I live in a frozen wasteland, specifically the city of Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba, Canada. Cold weather is the main thing people think about when they think of my hometown, but it's not Winnipeg's only claim to fame. In 1919 there was a general strike in this city which helped change the face of the labour movement in Canada.

That is of course the most important legacy of the Winnipeg General Strike. But that is not actually the aspect of the strike that I chose to focus on for the work that I did for the exhibition inspired by the strike that took place with my collective The Frost Shield Kerfuffle in 2019 entitled Revolting. Instead I chose to focus on something that I read a few years ago all about population projections for the city of Winnipeg around the turn of the 20th Century. At that time, speculation was that Winnipeg would reach a population of 2,000,000 and the province would be 4,000,000 by the year 2000. This did not happen, but it's easy to see why they thought that. By 1919 Winnipeg was Canada's third largest city and it was booming. It is now eighth, if I'm not mistaken. As I understand it, the reason for the decline of Winnipeg and it's current status as a mid-sized North American city is that the city was hit very hard by two things. One of those was the building of the Panama canal, which meant that the trade that went through Winnipeg by rail was deeply affected, but also the Winnipeg General Strike.

Over the last number of years I've become very interested in what is often called New Urbanism, which focuses on–how should I put this–making cities great again. Sorry to make you think of the orange one. Anyway, personally I look longingly at cities with great transit, and walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods. In Canada the only cities that really have this in spades are our largest cities and even they have been damaged by car culture, which is an unrelated factor that has contributed to the fall of once very liveable cities all across North America. But it's the reason I kind of wish Winnipeg had made it to two million. We'd probably be a little like a frozen Vancouver, which would be pretty awesome!

Anyway, all this to say, for the the Revolting exhibition I wrote and recorded an original song about Winnipeg and made an animated video to accompany it. The reason I bring this up, is because while the initial showing of this exhibition took place two and half years ago, Revolting has risen again! The exhibition is currently touring the province of Manitoba through an organization called the Manitoba Arts Network and more importantly for this post, there is also an online exhibition that runs until March 1st.

This means that for the first time, my animation is available publicly. The piece, which is entitled: Burton Cummings' Moustache or the Monty Hall Problem is full of inside jokes that only Winnipeggers (and some other Canadians) will really understand. As you can see it name drops two expat Winnipeggers, Monty Hall of the game show Let's Make a Deal and Burton Cummings of The Guess Who fame, i.e. American Woman, These Eyes etc.

The animation has one prominent inside joke I should explain. In the late 70s, Portage and Main, once the most famous intersection in Canada (supposedly), was closed to pedestrian traffic. That's right the city deliberately tried to get people off the streets of our downtown! Bizarre, no? In 2018 a plebiscite was held asking whether the people of Winnipeg wanted the intersection open to pedestrians again. And guess what? Suburbanites voted it down. The vote open sign you see in the animation is a reference to that ridiculously backwards and stupid decision to allow cars to speed through our downtown as fast as they can. Ugh! It still makes me angry! Anyway, now that you know what that means, maybe some of what you see in the animation will have relevance to your city, especially if you don't live in a big vibrant one. Also, I really think the song is pretty damned good, so you should at least give it a listen!

Animation Stills from Burton Cummings' Moustache or the Monty Hall Problem.

The big bonus of me posting this is: while you're at it, you can see work by my fellow Kerfufflers, Michael Boss, Cullen Bingeman, Tim Brown, Evin Collis, Kelly-Jo Dorvault, Patricia Eschuck, Peter Graham, Ken Harasym and Diana Thorneycroft, all of whom did amazing work for the show! Click here to see it all: The Frost Shield Kerfuffle is Revolting.