My City is a Graveyard
Exhibition by Morgan Traa
Opening Reception: JANUARY 10, 6-9 PM
Exhibition Run: JANUARY 10 – FEBRUARY 28
Artist Talk: FEBRUARY 7, 7 PM
Gallery Hours: WEDNESDAY – SATURDAY, 12- 5 PM
206 Princess St. Winnipeg MB
Morgan Traa is a Winnipeg-based artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors) from the University of Manitoba. Working across film, installation, and arts administration, Morgan is an active member of IATSE 856 and Chair of CARFAC Winnipeg. Their work has been recognized with several awards, including the University of Manitoba’s Emerging Leader Award (2022) and the Canadian International Film Festival’s Rising Star Award (2016). A passionate advocate for artists’ rights, Morgan also contributes to local arts initiatives, while continuing to shape Winnipeg’s creative landscape through their practice and leadership.
My City is a Graveyard documents Traas’ relationship with the city of Winnipeg as a young adult following the loss of her mother, and home, and the feeling of displacement within the city that accompanied these life-altering changes. Consisting of 17 paintings and a video that includes the artist’s poetry, My City Is a Graveyard uses Winnipeg as a backdrop for longing, anger and reclamation of place. Utilizing a painting style akin to American voyeurism, an unbridgeable distance is felt between the viewer and the painting, void of figures, the visual tension in Traa’s
landscapes are paradoxically heavy with absence.
The hot sun casts sharp lines dappled by sunlight through trees, buildings resembling monuments to grief imposing on the blue sky. Traas’ work asks us to reflect on what it means to stay in a city full of memories with buildings like gravestones.
“I’m Isolated within the city walls, downtown is quiet and I am stuck in time. The city and I have this in common. We sit and wait to be moved, brutal in our stance and uncompromising in our resolve. My city is a graveyard.” – Traa
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“Traa looks at the city she grew up in and paints it in acrylic with a careful hand. Her work singles out personal places and transforms them into somber monuments. Do these buildings, as headstones, mark the ongoing relationship between the Indigenous people of Treaty One land and the settlers who colonized it? Perhaps this body of work is one way that Traa is reconciling as a white-settler, looking at the neighbourhoods that nurtured her and what buildings stand there at this moment in time.” – Rae Swan (she/they), Métis artist and writer.
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Artists – particularly those who share studio space – are lucky to witness firsthand the evolution of their peers’ work. Over the years, I’ve been one of the lucky individuals to see both the ways in which Traa’s work has changed, but also how it has stayed true to her values.
Among great jumps in content and conceptual groundings, the consistent thread of Traa’s process is that it remains holistic. Traa’s practice considers what it means to take active parts in the world around us, steeping her work in socio-political and historical concerns, but also how we relate to the city, the land it sits on, and ourselves by extension. In Traa’s Winnipeg, the lines between self and place merge and disappear as mere social constructions. She points out the responsibility we share to care for the city and one another as community members, while also
appreciating growth at the level of the individual, acknowledging our underlying privilege to exist in this place, and finding the poetic and spiritual in between crumbling bricks and clear skies.
The hallmarks of Traa’s visual style run parallel to qualities that can be found in both the artist herself and the landscapes she exists in – detail-oriented and unafraid to face the world for what it is. Traa unflinchingly captures our city with a resilience that mirrors her own – worn signs and never-ending construction sites are embraced and the seemingly mundane is appreciated and turned into beautifully stark compositions with a careful eye. Under Traa’s hand, bleak grey buildings are silhouetted against great expanses of prairie sky that turn the stratosphere into a
recurring character in her work. After all, where does the spirit of a city really live? I’d argue it exists in the negative space – across paved roads, in open windows, and within the cavities and swathes of empty space both surrounded and contained by the structures we construct. Further, what creates the spirit of a city but those of us who live here? Each breath we inhale is a breath exhaled by those who came before us.
My City is a Graveyard acknowledges that loss and beauty can go hand-in-hand; that to move on is to push through seasons of continual change – cycling through endless summers, falls, winters, and springs to appreciate the lessons that each one brings. Traa’s Winnipeg cradles these lessons gently beneath the surface, gifting them to those of us brave enough to look closer. – Zoë LeBrun, artist
About aceartinc.: We are an artist-run centre dedicated to the support, exhibition, and dissemination of contemporary art. aceartinc. Presents five major exhibitions a year by contemporary visual artists. www.aceart.org
We are on Treaty 1 Territory. On the original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. We offer our respect and gratitude to the caretakers of this land.
