MULTIMEDIA MIXTAPE

Program Reviews | Samantha Kilpatrick

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I recently found myself in Winnipeg for a week, and while I was there I dropped into the Winnipeg Art Gallery, (the WAG) to check out their collection, but specifically to see their The 80s Image exhibition, which centered the idea of changing media as it affected art production.

The exhibition title, at the WAG. Photo courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick. 

I explored this exhibition through another changing media, the museum's app, and the in-app audio tour. The audio tour is a mixtape in its own right, a collection of 80s songs related to the artwork on display as curated by CKUW, the University of Winnipeg's university radio station.

A screencap of the app, with both song
and artwork displayed.

Listening to 80s music in an art gallery, while contemplating art, is a fantastic experience I would recommend to just about anyone. Fair warning, it can make you want to bop along to music only you can hear.

As in tours of all kinds, your mileage may vary on how much you get out of it. I definitely found that it had me lingering longer with each work supported by the app- at least long enough to get a sense of the song and to try to understand how it connected to the work on display.

I freely admit I don't know much about 80s music- but I came to the suspicion, walking through the gallery that these songs were chosen for their essential '80s-ness' as much as the works on display were. There's a multisensory effect that's hard to quantify, and having these songs fit to each work and the time period in which both were created was a very striking experience.

I was very interested in how this Mixtape Tour was going to cover the more politically fraught issues of the exhibition- there's a whole room in The 80s Image of huge painted panels and silkscreened wallpaper by Canadian artist collective General Idea made to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic.

I shouldn't have worried.


In the mixtape, this room is accompanied by an absolutely haunting arrangement of Tainted Love, slowed down and stretched out and distorted from a bop to an absolutely harrowing experience. It was one of the few songs on this tour that I didn't even think of stopping partway through and moving on.

AIDS, by art collective General
 Idea, on display at the WAG.
Gif courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick.

Listening to that song, in the presence of that art, made me wish I knew much more about music. Tainted Love is a song memetic enough that one can assume a general population's knowledge of it, if not all its iterations. The distorted use and the selection of this arrangement (further research would lead me to discover all profits from that single went to AIDS research, years before discussion of the issue was acceptable in the mainstream) honestly blew me away. It made me wonder what other stories I was missing, hiding in the history of the music. The single change I would make to this audio tour would be the inclusion of a story about the music in the app.

The distortion of the music and the use of new media in music- the heavy synth and the techno and the nearly unpleasant audio distortion- all mirror the radical changes occurring in the artworks hung on the gallery walls. (For my Toronto readers who want to replicate the experience- you can find another edition of this work on display at the 4th floor of the AGO as of the writing of this article,  and the audio tour is downloadable anywhere.)

 This tour felt incredibly interesting and distinctive, weaving together visual and audio art made in a time of social and artistic upheaval in an experience that made a single cohesive whole out of the two parts. I wish all audio tours were so ambitious- rocketing between fun and thoughtful, provoking and reflective. If you find yourself in Winnipeg before this exhibition closes on April 14th, do yourself a favour and get the mixtape too.