If you find yourself riding along the Trans-Canada Highway into Winnipeg, Manitoba – just west of the longitudinal centre of Canada – you should take a tour of the new North Winnipeg Parkway that winds itself along the lazy, meandering Red River. It is here you will find the studio of one of Winnipeg’s finest pedal-powered sculptural artists, Jordan Van Sewell.
A fourth generation railwayman in this city born of train and grain, Van Sewell draws on the history of Winnipeg and his Point Douglas neighborhood for artistic inspiration. He recounts his days of riding across town to Point Douglas on his lime green Canadian Tire Supercycle to his first job as a Canadian Pacific Railway porter. “It developed a patina,” notes the sculptor whose bronze works are now developing a patina of their own. Derailed by this memory, he recalls his first bike – shiny red with white fenders – a “Mountie” from Eaton’s. He rode every Prairie boy’s dream bike into the 1960s.
Van Sewell rides out of the dense foliage around his Point Douglas home, past riverboat docks, a new condominium development and the theatre district to The Forks – a centuries-old meeting place where the Red River and the Assiniboine River meet. Within meters, cyclists can find his 2004 series of large-scale steel sculptures which adorn the North Winnipeg Parkway. The various sculptures and their interpretive plaques celebrate and commemorate the lively history of the riverbank – the site of early industrial development and immigrant neighborhoods.
The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, an epic moment in Canadian labor history, was one of these riverbank events that inspired Van Sewell. The strike primarily occurred in Liberty Park, formerly known as Victoria Park after Queen Victoria. Apart from Van Sewell’s towering sculpture topped with its tottering rollercoaster, there is little evidence of the turbulence of 1919, when workers marched into the park en masse and immobilized the city. Only when the City of Winnipeg’s Mounted Police stormed the silent parade of striking workers six weeks later on Bloody Saturday did the protest end and work resumed. Van Sewell marks the site with his inscription Queen Victoria and Prince Albert merrily riding around, oblivious to the changing times below them. “The Queen would not have approved,” he speculates.
The rattle of a freight train on an overhead bridge drowns out Van Sewell’s attempts to describe his “Grain is King” sculpture situated below. The plaque reads Grain has built this town and has driven the economy of Winnipeg for many years. He glances up at the passing train carrying China Shipping and Maersk Lines containers, not a single grain car among them, and notes the changing times.
Having finished our tour of his sculpture series along the North Winnipeg Parkway, Van Sewell leads the way home. Settling into a chair in his Little Galleria, he is surrounded by his robots, newts, skeletons, grieving praying mantises and hapless humans. Some drive cars or motorcycles or lean out of boats and trains. A small ceramic Van Sewell rides a vintage motorcycle high on a shelf. He ruefully comments on the absence of bicycles: those works have all been snapped up by collectors. The small figures may be static but the gallery is alive with his wry and bemused, yet gentle take on the curious ever-changing world we inhabit.
For more on Jordan Van Sewell’s work visit www.jordanvansewell.com.
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