On Screen Manitoba

This article from The Manitoban features Plug In ICA highlighting it's 40 years of being a great asset in Winnipeg's contemporary artists as well as a unique platform that has given the city international exposure. It also helped the creation of organizations like Videopool & MAWA.

Imagine for a minute that you are an artist. You’re local, from Manitoba and eager to showcase your contemporary work in the belief that it will stretch boundaries, shatter expectations and change the landscape of contemporary art altogether. Museums and formal galleries such as the Winnipeg Art Gallery are seemingly impenetrable to an artist like yourself, one just emerging from the underground world of creative self-exploration and trying to spread your wings. Forty-one years ago, finding a space in which to display your creations, no matter how groundbreaking you believe they are, would have been nearly impossible.

The Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art was formed by a group of dissatisfied artists for just this purpose: to highlight the creative process of non-mainstream art and to emphasize the experimental, sometimes “difficult” art in all media. Contrary to the agendas of museums and formal galleries, Plug In has always strove to emphasize the creative process rather than just the creative product.

Since 1972, Plug In has provided local artists with a vehicle for creative expression and has fostered an important discourse concerning contemporary art and art practice. From its inception in a small loft at 90 Albert Street, to its clean, modern current location in the Buhler Centre, Plug In ICA has become the prairie’s leading contemporary art gallery and will continue to be a leader in the local contemporary art scene by setting the bar at an unprecedented level.

“It was organized really to be a place where younger artists at the time had an opportunity to meet and show their work and collaborate,” Anthony Kiendl, Director of Plug In ICA said about the origin of the institution.

Kiendl was a 2009 winner of a $15000 national curatorial award, one of two Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards. Kiendl has been Director of Plug In since 2006.

Albert Street in the 1970s was a place and time where anything seemed possible, says Kiendl. Creativity was valued, and the founding artists of the Plug In Institute were “riding a wave” of new ideas including the environmental movement, equality and civil rights, adds Kiendl.

Read the rest of this article HERE.