legs: A collaborative exhibition by Christine Fellows, Chantel Mierau, Jennifer Still

November 23, 2023 - February 16, 2024
Reception: November 23, 4:00 - 6:00 pm at Gallery 1C03

Gallery 1C03 is pleased to present the Canadian premiere of the award-winning short film, legs.

legs is elegy. A poem written with the full length of the body.

Winnipeg artists Christine Fellows (music/sound/stop-motion), Chantel Mierau (costume/video) and Jennifer Still (poet) work in stride with life’s undoings—snapped clotheslines, drained swimming pools, shimmering nylon runs—to translate Still's poem into a video installation. In the process, they discover what falls away is not necessarily gone.

Jennifer Still: “Embodying my poem with Christine and Chantel expands my sense of voice into its fullest being: swimming the poem, singing the poem, wearing it! Our process shows me how a poem can live and be lived: inside and outside all at once, hovering just above and below the furling, unfurling, crumpling page.”

“legs create[s] a gap that connects several generations of women... The film distinguishes itself through its unique object creations and an extraordinary timing that often borders on the absurd. Colorful mourning in glitter. What’s left when the body’s gone? Stockings.” 
                                       --Jury statement from the ZEBRA International Poetry Film Festival
                                       (Berlin), where legs was awarded the 2023 Ritter Sport Film Award

legs was created in the Red River Valley on Treaty One Territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Treaty Three Territory, Pine Falls, Manitoba, with generous grant awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and Manitoba Arts Council.

The exhibition program will feature a discussion with the artists and a hands-on poetry workshop that invites participants to create their own unique, wearable "care tag" poem.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Christine Fellows finds music in sounds we tend to take for granted: the voices of the people we love, the sounds of the spaces we move through as part of our daily lives. Although she identifies primarily as a songwriter and performer, her practice includes poetry, spoken word, paper collage, stop motion video, sound design, and composition. Over two decades, she has released 8 solo albums, and toured internationally both as a solo artist and as a collaborator, from the Canadian Arctic to Southern Australia. For her latest solo album Stuff We All
Get (2022) she created 13 songs alongside 13 stop-motion videos.

Chantel Mierau is a visual artist working in video and performance. Her work examines the everyday, and a frequent focal point in her work is the body and clothing. By strategically using repetition to either lull and comfort, or to build tension and suspense, Mierau reckons with the comfort and discomfort of living in a body. Since graduating from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2011, she has exhibited locally and nationally. Her recent work "3 Chores" was exhibited in Winnipeg at Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Art in 2019 and was subsequently featured in BlackFlash Magazine in 2020.

Jennifer Still composes poems with physicality. She is the author of several handmade chapbooks and three poetry books, Comma (Book*hug), Girlwood (Brick Books) and Saltations (Thistledown). legs is a limited-edition chapbook with Baseline Press (2022) and winner of the 2021 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. In 2020 she collaborated with Christine Fellows on "I Write with Fossils", a video-poem exploration, and the live-action sewing video "Close Call" with Chantel Mierau. She was the 2015 Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg where her first line of legs remains looped through a ceiling tile.

RESOURCES
Exhibition brochure

GALLERY HOURS
Monday - Friday between 12:00 and 4:00 pm from November 23, 2023 until February 16, 2024 (closed December 21, 2023 until January 7, 2024).

AFFILIATED EVENTS
Reception: November 23, 2023, 4:00 – 6:00 pm at Gallery 1C03
Conversation with Christine Fellows, Chantel Mierau and Jennifer Still: January 24, 2024 at 4:00 pm
Care Tag Poetry Workshop: February 10, 2024 at 1:00 pm

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gallery 1C03 is on Treaty 1 Territory, the homeland of the Red River Métis and the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Ininew, Anishininew, Dakota and Dene peoples. Our water is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.

GETTING HERE AND ACCESSIBILITY
Maps of The University of Winnipeg campus, including accessibility and parking maps, can be found at https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/maps/. The Gallery is located on the main floor of Centennial Hall at 515 Portage Avenue. Accessible, street level visitor entrances with auto door openers and ramps are via Portage Avenue, Ellice Avenue and Spence Street. The gallery doors are equipped with auto-openers. There is a gender-neutral, accessible washroom less than 100 feet from the Gallery entrance. Our exhibitions and affiliated events are free to everyone.