Picturing The Peg and the City of God: Subconscious City and Illuminating the Word

What does Winnipeg look like? That depends on your vantage point. Curated by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Subconscious City, showing at the Winnipeg Art Gallery until May 11, is a collection of recent work by a who’s-who of upcoming and established local artists. Working in all manner of media, these artists have produced a multi-faceted portrait of The Peg: its surface and its underneath, its then and its now. This is your grandpa’s Winnipeg, too­­—but as seen through multigenerational eyes, and from
unconventional angles.

Showing until June 8 is the sole Canadian exhibition of Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible, which features both the
preparation of and finished pages from the first handwritten, illuminated Bible commissioned in five centuries. The
archaic art of manuscript illumination, made obsolete with the fifteenth-century introduction of the printing press, is reborn
with this extraordinary undertaking, which in its incorporation of Eastern and Native American religious traditions reflects the multiculturalism of our modern world. The Good Book hasn’t looked this good in some time.