City of dreams Architect adds art from the past to envision a Winnipeg of the future By: Frances Koncan Posted: 7:00 PM CST Thursday, Mar. 5, 2020

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This article was published 04/03/2020 (1758 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg is full of secrets, and architect Kevin Fawley is passionate about exposing them in his new exhibition, The ReMix City, which opens this month at Warehouse Artworks as a part of First Fridays in the Exchange.

“A lot of Winnipeggers aren’t aware of the city’s history,” Fawley says. “I’m interested in the fun little cocktail-party facts you hear, like Harry Houdini hung above this building and did an escape trick.”

Fawley, a 36-year-old architect, is enthusiastic about buildings and city transportation; historic images of the city’s streetcars, the University of Winnipeg and the downtown Hudson’s Bay building play an important role in his imagining of a post-apocalyptic city thematically centred on public transit and hydroelectric power.

“One of the images in the show has got a bunch of Nazis driving around on Portage Avenue in front of the University of Winnipeg,” he says of the picture of If Day, a simulated German invasion that took place on Feb. 19, 1942. “Back during World War II, to raise awareness for the public to buy bonds, they had a bunch of people dress up as Nazis and drive army tanks to get the message across.

“You couldn’t do that today, so I took those images and put them in my work.”

The ReMix City is the third phase in a process that began in 2009 as part of his thesis while studying architecture at the University of Manitoba.

“I dig through old archival photos, cut them apart and mash them up with today’s photographs to create a bizarre, film-noir narrative of a potential future of Winnipeg,” Fawley explains.

Fawley works primarily with black-and-white photos, as they blend together best within the collage technique.

“Every decade has a different colour hue,” he notes. “I print the images off on a black-and-white copier and use a knife to cut them apart and use spray glue and masking tape to stitch them back together again, then blend it all over with powdered charcoal.”

Fawley begins with a central image in mind, then allows the work to develop organically in response to that image.

“The images compose themselves,” he says. “I like to think the story is unravelling itself and redefining itself as time goes on.”

The collection on display consists of the 11 original works that constitute the third phase of The ReMix City. Fawley estimates there are 30 pieces in total, which combine to tell a story.

“All the work kind of relates to each other,” he says. “In the story, the electric streetcar has been resurrected with mechanical spider legs. It’s kind of a commentary on how the automobile has shaped the North American city.

‘We used to have electric transit that ran 24 hours a day all the way to Selkirk and back, and today we’re arguing about a single lane of asphalt that doesn’t even go from the U of M to downtown.

“It seems that we’re a little backwards.”

Fawley’s passion for public transit is tempered by a distinct practicality and desire to create something tangible in his work. One portion of his process included making tiny machines, called hoppers.

“I built these little machines with these little spider legs and a needle from a turntable that reads the environment. It picks up signals and sends it off to a receiver, which has power.”

The energy generated goes back to the hopper’s motor, enabling it to move. The hopper features heavily in Fawley’s work and his envisioning of a city running solely on electric power.

“The idea is applying the concept to a streetcar, reading the environment and acting accordingly.”

For Fawley, the intersection between art and architecture is clear, even though the stakes are different.

“When you think of architectural drawings, you may think of crisp, nice, hand-drafted clean lines, but we don’t live in a crisp, clean world. We live in a lived-in world,” he says.

“With this process, you’re not held back by fear of making a mistake. You can just keep moving forward through the process.”

Fawley’s creative process mirrors his vision of architecture and urbanism going forward, emphasizing the concept of survival and highlighting humanity’s relationship with the environment.

“An architectural proposition cannot attempt to address environment deficiencies without also addressing social conditions,” writes Fawley in an artistic statement. “Any theory of design and ecology must acknowledge that the essential point of sustainability is not the individual building but urbanism.”

frances.koncan@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @franceskoncan