Pavilion Art Galleries

Biomes: A Celebration of Biodiversity by Brandi Shabaga
March 1 - May 24, 2026

This exhibit pays homage to the stunning showcase of plants at The Leaf and the surrounding green spaces of the Assiniboine Park, including the Riley Family Duck Pond, English Garden, and Leo Mol Sculpture Garden. Created during a self-led artist residency at The Leaf and the surrounding Park from March to November 2025, this collection aims to cultivate feelings of awareness, serenity, and self-reflection on society’s relationship with nature.

“Biomes” is an exhibit of mixed-media nature portraits, filled with elements of movement, symbolism, texture, and bold colour palettes – for nature lovers alike.

Artist Hours
Brandi will be hosting artist hours during their exhibition to draw and talk with visitors about their work.

Time: 10:00 am - 1:00 pm
Dates: Saturday, May 2 & 16
Location: Community Gallery, 2nd floor of the Pavilion

Art Details
In The Reeds
Mixed media collage on canvas, 12 x 36 x 1.5 in.
Brandi Shabaga, 2026

“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.

Read More about The Pooh Gallery

Real Unsettled: Magic Realism and Walter Phillips

Applying magic realism – a term closely linked with Latin American literature – to the work of Walter Phillips, an English-born settler living in early-twentieth century Canada, may seem unexpected. His solemn landscapes of tree-ringed lakes, mossy forests, and stately mountains, rendered in lines both delicate and incisive, seem rooted in a realist and naturalist tradition, untouched by the fantastical.

Magic realism was coined by German art critic and photographer Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a surge of post-Expressionist art that returned to realism but retained undercurrents of the extraordinary. Over time, Latin American writers and critics extended the term to define a literary genre that challenged Eurocentric assumptions of time, space, dimensionality, objectivity and what counts as “real.” Because of its distortion of reality, magic realism has often been used to read artworks by Indigenous artists. Unlike surrealism, fantasy, or the gothic – which foreground dream states, inner worlds, the macabre and grotesque – magic realism manifests itself through the mundane.

This exhibition presents the work of Walter Phillips alongside other Canadian artists whose representational artworks lean toward realism, yet subtly (or not so subtly) unsettle the familiar through unexpected formal strategies, unusual subject matter, or the capacity to evoke wonder and unease. Bringing Phillips into dialogue with these selected works from the WAG’s collection prompts us to view his landscapes through the lens of magic realism, to find moments of slippage, or fracturing, that unsettles our assumptions of reality and the familiar.

Curated by Marie-Anne Redhead, WAG-Qaumajuq Assistant Curator of Indigenous & Contemporary Art

Art Details
Self-Portrait, 1953
Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 61 cm
Frederick B. Taylor (Canadian, 1906–1987)

Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery
Gift of Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal, G-88-246