Taking Reel Pride in transformation

Reel Pride isn’t entering a mid-life crisis.

At 40, the annual Winnipeg LGBTTQ+ film festival appears as forward-looking as ever — though at the moment, its president, Ray Desautels, is feeling reflective about its arc.

“The festival started at a time when … you didn’t see LGBTQ characters on television, and if you did, they were shown in a very poor light or very stereotypical way,” he says.

“It’s become more, I think, a gathering place for queer people and queer arts … It’s more of an arts festival, not necessarily just strictly the film festival that it used to be. So we’re a gathering place for the queer community and its allies and supporters.”

Artist explores internal dialogues with a surreal twist

Can you ever truly be alone with your thoughts when your thoughts don’t leave you alone?

In the oil and acrylic paintings that populate Bria Fernandes’ solo show, Things Left Unsaid — on view now at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg — feelings and thoughts of self-doubt, anxiety, grief and displacement show up as physical visitors, often in the most banal moments of daily life. Like when you’re brushing your teeth, say. Or making coffee.

In the 2024 work Ain’t Misbehavin’, they arrive when the central figure is pulling on her socks. A melancholy blue figure leans against her thigh as though seeking comfort. Another appears from behind, hands on her shoulders.

“She’s trying to live her life, and she’s having these thoughts, and the thoughts in her mind are coming out into reality and interacting with her,” Fernandes says.

Photographer focuses on finding the whimsical

Synesthesia — a psychological condition associated with sounds producing the sensation of colours and shapes — is supposed to affect many of the world’s musical savants.

Interdisciplinary Winnipeg artist Ayoub Moustarzak seems to have this condition in inverse.

“This song was a little backwards. I started with visuals,” he says of his debut single, Breaks Apart, a theatrical ballad featuring pianist Dallas Nedotiafko, released in August.

“(My music) is more of a visual storytelling experience that comes with a song.”

Podcast paints verbal portraits of array of creative careers, disciplines

Nobody told Madison Beale how to find a career in art, so the 25-year-old is figuring it out herself, one podcast episode at a time.

Beale didn’t exactly hate her job in the tech industry, but she didn’t feel as passionately about selling specialized IT services as she did about contemporary Canadian art, the legacy of female dealers and the cat she named after pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Rossetti.

Just before moving to Winnipeg in 2020, the erstwhile student at the U.K.’s Exeter University determined it was worth investing more time and energy into a career in the art world.

“I decided that I just didn’t want to spend another day not being close to art,” says Beale, an art history student at the University of Manitoba who describes herself as a ballsy go-getter. “I wanted to try to make it work, so I gave myself a year, and then really quickly after I made that decision, the ball just really got rolling.”

On the money

Three million $2 coins bearing artwork by Daphne Odjig will soon circulate through the country.

Odjig, who died in 2016, was one of the country’s most notable artists and a key innovator of the Woodlands style, an Indigenous art movement that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century. Her celebrated career took flight while living in Manitoba.

The Royal Canadian Mint unveiled the commemorative coin at a media conference at the Manitoba Museum on Thursday, marking the first Canadian circulation coin to feature a female visual artist.

The toonie comes in coloured and uncoloured varieties.

New local theatre production defies categorization

A groundbreaking children’s album about gender roles and a nudity-laden magazine promising “entertainment for men” collide in Glory!, the latest — and largest-ever — performance piece by We Quit Theatre, a scrappy, do-it-ourselves local theatre collective.

Described as a “contemporary dance docu-drama,” Glory! opens tonight at Théâtre Cercle Molière.

We Quit, led by Gislina Patterson and Dasha Plett, was sent down a research rabbit hole by actor Arne MacPherson and dance artist Emma Beech, who had been thinking for the better part of five years about how to explore the ideals of the 1972 album, Free to Be … You and Me, on stage.

Free to Be was a staple of Patterson’s childhood, with his parents MacPherson and Debbie Patterson playing it loudly and proudly. For Patterson, 31, the album represented a beautiful vision of 1970s idealism, liberation and utopianism. Created by actor Marlo Thomas, featuring contributions from Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte and NFL star Rosy Grier (author of the how-to handbook Needlepoint for Men), Free To Be is a landmark of both children’s entertainment and gender education.

What’s up

Wet Hot Ukrainian Summer

Times Change(d), 234 Main St.

Today, 8 p.m.

Tickets $19 at reallovewpg.com

Metamorphosis of a drama

Lara Rae’s autobiographical Dragonfly begins much where the author did — as a boy in 1960s Glasgow with the uncanny sense of not being a boy in the narrow way expected.

“If there’s one cliché I guess I lean into, I’ve loved opera since I was a youth,” says the trans playwright and comedian.

“I mean, it’s the joke in Philadelphia. (The gay character played by) Tom Hanks says that he’s listening to La Mamma Morta and it’s such a cliché that he’s crying over Callas.”

Now Rae is expressing her early love by developing Dragonfly into a 75-minute chamber piece with Manitoba Opera, making it the first Canadian opera centring on a trans person.

Empire built on encouraging words

Mentorship is Yisa Akinbolaji’s purpose.

It’s a role that came naturally for the decorated visual artist, who grew up in Nigeria as the eldest of 13 children, and a responsibility he aims to pass on to others.

“The talent that was embedded in me would’ve been wasted if I didn’t find others who were not selfish, who mentored me,” he says, seated in a busy studio outfitted with cameras, computers and art supplies.

Akinbolaji, 65, is the founder of Creative Foundation, an organization that runs after-school programming in the arts and technology out of a small strip mall in St. Vital. The space is new, but the concept is not.

Making the music seen

Sam Thompson didn’t know what a podcast was until just about the moment he recorded his first.

Nearly 13 years later, the music-obsessed journalist from Winnipeg is one week away from posting the 1,000th episode of Witchpolice Radio, a weekly local music interview program that’s outlived the iPod itself.

Since the show’s pilot in 2012, “doing Witchpolice” has become a rite of passage for hundreds of recording artists spanning musical eras and genres. Whether the artist makes Portage la Prairie queercore punk like Ticked Off (Ep. 997), cathartic metalcore such as Hopscotchbattlescars (No. 782), or danceable hip-hop fusion such as JayWood (No. 589), Thompson has maintained an open and receptive ear.

“I never thought the show would make it 100 episodes, let alone 500, let alone 1,000, so it’s kind of cool,” says Thompson, who will be on the receiving end of listener-submitted questions for the milestone episode.

Must. Destroy. Junk… to vent rage, raise money for art

During Emma Hendrix’s early years at Video Pool, the sound artist formed one side of a heated rivalry with an overpriced office mate that never seemed to get the message.

“Everybody knew how much I disliked the phone system,” says the executive director of the artist-run centre, dedicated since 1983 to technology-based art.

Which meant that Hendrix (who uses they/them pronouns) made sure to dial up the intensity at last year’s inaugural Smasher’s Bash fundraiser, where they got to deliver several crushing blows to the media centre’s freshly retired receivers.

“We also had this printer. You know how printers can be.”

Flo Rida playing

city in October

Time to break out the boots with the fur and the Reeboks with the straps: Flo Rida is coming to Winnipeg in the fall.

The Miami-based rapper will perform at Canada Life Centre on Oct. 1 with Canadian rapper Kardinal Offishall opening.

What’s up

Winter Kept Us Warm

Dave Barber Cinematheque, 100 Arthur St.

Aug. 15 to 20

Tickets: $7.50-$11.50