Ball and Chain

Janet Letkeman is a Winnipeg artist best known for their landscape, surrealist, and abstract oil paintings. However, during the pandemic, they turned to more accessible mediums in oil and collage to express values of inequality, cultural diversity, and the blurred boundaries that help us appreciate mutually common human sentiments.

Janet’s statement: Presenting original design elements along with recognized art and artifacts, the artist (Janet) offers a collection of collage works that reflect gender fluidity and multi-culturalism within an isolated self

Jeff Peeling
I create mixed media art. I drip paints for eyes and teeth, but also for sky or landforms. I utilize dripping to create an earthly, organic quality. I allow gravity to affect the drippings in order to escape from ego-based decisions. I use colored yarn for lines and hair. Collage plays a big part in my work and uses text relating to commercial sloganeering, philosophy, and mindfulness. As a vegetarian, I became bemused by the fact that I was constantly receiving meat advertisement flyers in the mail and ground beef depicting brains became a motif.

I have never attended art school. I am guided by intuition and expressionism. I try to be aware of my gut feeling and try to respond accordingly. As a huge music fan, I think of my art as the visual equivalent of the rawness of punk rock. Being inspired by children’s art, I value their playful expressionism as opposed to mannered, educated technique. I aim for immediacy and wildness in my brushwork or dripping and subverting the physical space by tearing holes in canvas or extending the picture with cardboard attachments, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture.

In the 21st century, it seems like digital animation would be the natural route to being relevant. Instead, I use analog to comment on the digital. The issue of cell phones and concerns about the negative influence of social media places my art firmly in the current era.

I had been daydreaming about a cell phone-obsessed individual at an exhibition of my art being utterly engrossed in their phone until looking up to realize that the subjects depicted in all of the pieces had also been so occupied by their own phones, not noticing that someone had come to view them.

Although Jeffrey Peeling is an artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, he was raised in London, Ontario and has previously lived in Toronto, Montreal, and Tokyo, Japan. As an artist, he admires children’s art and street art and is interested in the beauty of naïve expression. Recollections of his fascinations as a child inform his current practice, such as the joy of pop-ups and flipbooks inform his current practice. He uses paint dripping and collage on canvas as his primary mode of expression but has also explored cardboard dioramas and doll-making. Drips and splatters of acrylic paint and child-like scrawl are typical modes of expression.