Whose House? Alex’s House!

Photo by Callie Lugosi

Having lived and worked all over the world, Chilean-born artist/curator Alex Keim just can’t get enough of Winnipeg.

“I’ve lived in London, Paris, Stockholm, Calgary and Sydney for a little while,” Keim lists. “There’s a fabric of creative people here that I just find astounding. The music scene, the arts scene ...”

She abandoned a career in architecture to pursue art. Keim’s first works were massive.

“It started out being huge, metal, big things. And then through travel, it started getting smaller, smaller, smaller. The last body of work that I made was crocheted. Now, I’m carving wood, and I might start carving
stone again.”

Keim’s creative energies were soon redirected to curatorial endeavours.

“I prefer to stay in the background.”

The current director of La Maison des Artistes Visuels Francophones in St. Boniface, Keim has also offered her curatorial talents to Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of  the Contemporary Art and Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Keim and her daughter have been in the city for a little more than six years; this house has been their home for the last four.

Its theme is Art.

Every surface is lovingly curated with works Keim has connected with over the years. Her constantly rotating home gallery consists of works from Canadian and local artists, sprinkled with a few of her daughter’s and
her own.

 

Everyday people

“This little guy here is (a work by) Graeme Patterson, he’s from (Saskatoon), and he does all of these little characters that he encounters throughout his day out of found objects. This is a jogger he saw everyday when he was in Vancouver that was always around with his little iPod.”

Beneath the old oak tree

“The reason I bought the house was the oak tree. I wanted a good neighbourhood, and then I saw this house just in the springtime covered in snow, and I just fell in love with that tree.”

Window sill souvenirs

“Everywhere we go, we try to pick up something as a souvenir. The ‘Hello’ is from Phoenix from a great furniture place called the Potato Barn. They had this amazing furniture in a huge barn full of stuff. It was the only thing we could afford. My orchids, they’re really special too, because they come back every year at Christmastime. I just love them.”

Pop a cork

“Every time we have a celebration, we make little chairs.”

Whiskers

“He’s a sneak! And ‘pew!’ he’s gone for a day. It’s too much for me. I can’t have him outside, because he’s always been an indoor cat. He doesn’t have his shots or anything, and then he goes out and kills birds, and I don’t like that.”

Form & Function

“I started carving this box. And it opens. I’m trying to make something sculptural and functional at the same time. It needs a lot more work, but I’ve been having fun with that.”

Published in Volume 73, Number 3 of The Uniter (September 20, 2018)

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