1. J.D. Renaud

2. Hanna Reimer

3. Adelle Rawluk

J.D. Renaud is a mixed-media collage artist and a third-time winner of the Uniter 30’s favourite visual artist category.

He has been creating collage-based artwork since 2012, using movie and concert posters, calendars, art books and other types of printed media to make colourful, abstract and geometric designs. Renaud uses scissors, exacto knives, drafting rulers and other paper crafting tools to cut and paste his art.

He works at a table in his office room for eight to nine hours a day, listening to history and true-crime podcasts or lo-fi beats for concentration. He says his floor is always covered in paper scraps and that he wears “grubby” clothing he doesn’t mind getting covered in glue.

In October, Renaud was commissioned to make a floor-to-ceiling mural in the bathrooms at the Artspace building. The mural is a tribute to the late Dave Barber, senior programmer for the Winnipeg Film Group, who had been collecting film posters since 1984.

“It's all encompassing. It's huge ... It is a combination, an abstraction of my interpretations of decades of work, posters that were primarily all made by Dave,” Renaud says.

The bathroom murals at Artspace took one month to complete. It is the largest commissioned piece Renaud has ever produced.

“I always like to say that art in the bathroom is one of the highest honours you could give an artist, because there's nowhere else to look and nothing else to do in the bathroom than stare at the walls,” he says. “It feels like a great honour to be a permanent fixture there now.”

Although he is proud to have completed the Artspace mural, last year, Renaud created his favourite commissioned piece for a married couple who gave him a giant shoe box filled with six to seven years’ worth of movie-ticket stubs.

Renaud says this piece will always have a special place in his heart, and he is awestruck to have been trusted with the project.

Currently, he works as the art curator at The Handsome Daughter, where he showcases his own work and runs various art shows every three to four months.

Published in Volume 77, Number 12 of The Uniter (December 1, 2022)