Pavilion Art Galleries
CLOSURE NOTICE: On Sunday, September 14, The Pavilion art galleries will close early at 2:00 pm. Regular hours of operation will resume on September 15.
One of Winnipeg's most recognizable and beloved landmarks, The Pavilion has served as the heart of Assiniboine Park for over 100 years.
The original building was constructed in 1908, one year before the Park officially opened, and replaced with the current structure in 1930 following a fire.
Today, the beautifully restored Pavilion is home to the largest collections of works by renowned Manitoba artists Ivan Eyre, Walter J. Phillips, and Clarence Tillenius. Through WAG@ThePark, a partnership with the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), Park visitors enjoy free entry to expertly curated exhibitions, drawn largely from the Conservancy's collection, as well as from the WAG's vast holdings.
The Galleries
Community Gallery (2nd Floor)
Michel LeBlanc: DeConstruction
August 24, 2025 - November 23, 2025
Cardboard evokes visceral memories of some of our most common and universal everyday moments: opening gifts, moving to a new home, and sending packages. These interactions and recollections are often unremarkable, but through the deconstruction of this commonly discarded material, both the medium and the memories are transformed into something new and dynamic. Michel LeBlanc disassembles found cardboard objects and uses the inherent texture of each item to drive his aesthetic. He complements the pieces with elaborate miniature objects to construct dream-like scenes. The viewer is encouraged to interact with the pieces and form their perspective through a search-and-find for hidden elements and intricate details.
Simone Obendoerfer and Michel LeBlanc would like to thank EventLight and Leon A. Brown Ltd. for their generous support of the exhibition.
Art Details
Garage
Mixed media
33 x 37 x 15 cm
Pooh Gallery (2nd Floor)
“The Best Bear in All the World”: The Many Sides of Winnie-the-Pooh
This exhibition brings together objects, archives, and works of art drawn from the collection of the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, Colebourn Family Archive, and the Archive of Modern Conflict to sift through the elements of fact, fiction, and fantasy that together comprise the multilayered identity of Winnie-the-Pooh.
John P Crabb Gallery (2nd Floor)
Living Pictures from the Land
Living Pictures from the Land explores connections between tableau vivants and the idyllic watercolour paintings of Walter J. Phillips, drawing further parallels with works by contemporary artists Edward Burtynsky, Simon Hughes, Sarah Anne Johnson, Holly King, and Shelley Niro.
“Pure landscapes are weather pictures, pictures of light, records of the day,” wrote Phillips in his unpublished manuscript. Tableau characteristics are embodied by the artist in the careful and seemingly innocent depiction of landscapes through the placement of a canoe on a lake, a totem among the trees, or a young child gazing upon a picturesque scene. Ingrained in our national consciousness, these views reinforce white settler colonial aspirations of a Canadian utopia. Like tableau vivants, Phillips' works straddle the space between the real and the imaginary.
Presented alongside contemporary photography, print and painting, the exhibition investigates the artistic desire for a true and real image, highlighting instead the tensions that surface between constructed binaries of fact and fiction, document and myth, past and future. In this way, the exhibition question constructions of truth on a land rife with intertwined histories.
Participating Artists: Walter J. Phillips, Edward Burtynsky, Simon Hughes, Sarah Anne Johnson, Holly King, and Shelley Niro
Holly King. Canadian, b. 1958. Fair, from the series Coming into View, 2002. chromogenic colour print on paper, 1/5. 153 x 109.5 cm. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Gift of the artist, 2014-126. Photo by Ernest Mayer, courtesy of WAG-Qaumajuq
Ivan Eyre Gallery (3rd Floor)
Looking Through
The Silhouettes and Cutaways of Ivan Eyre
This exhibition presents a selection of Ivan Eyre’s series of “silhouettes” and “cutaways”.
It also studies his fascination with using everyday structures, such as the windowsill or a common packing box as a framing device. For Eyre, these structures were a gateway for “looking through”—and beyond—physical reality as we may commonly perceive it. These frameworks bring us closer to a surreal exploration of time, space, figuration, and subject.
This interesting framing technique gently invites us to look closer, to spend time deciphering the two (or more) images, and to consider fundamental questions of representation, reality, and illusion. Although the gut reaction is to draw a narrative between the multiple subject matters, the more one attempts to do so, the more absurd the individual elements of the image seem to become. These disorienting and complex compositions are an exploration in depth and spatiality, and a play on the traditional figure-ground dependency.
Ivan Eyre. Green Eve, 1992. acrylic on canvas, 192.9 x 172.9 cm. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Gift of the artist, G-92-497.
Contact gallerymanager@assiniboinepark.ca for general inquiries about art at Assiniboine Park.
Inquiries from artists regarding exhibitions in the Community Gallery can be directed to submissions@assiniboinepark.ca.
