Winnipeg’s pre-eminent architect Etienne Gaboury built the Provincial Remand Centre in 1994. His Precious Blood church (1969) was a high watermark in our city’s modernist design. Whenever Noam Gonick would walk by the Remand Centre on his way to the gym he’d came across girlfriends and family members of inmates standing across the street from the facility waving and gesticulating to their loved ones inside. Often the girls were underage and could not legally get inside to visit. With the structure’s glass architecture and the use of cell phones, intimate encounters were made possible. Love messages are often written in freshly fallen snow on the plaza in front of the courthouse that faces the prison’s windows. For a week Gonick and his crew staked out the site and spoke to many of these visitors, documenting their often-raucous semaphore and the silhouettes of the predominantly Native prisoners inside.

For the installation Precious Blood, initially commissioned by David McIntosh for the Nuit Blanche exhibition “Testbed” at Ontario College of Art & Design, a waist-high scale model of the structure was created out of translucent projection material and the architectural model’s facets became multiple screen surfaces to project upon.

CREDITS

Editor - Cliff Caines
Construction - Przemek Pyszczek
Documentation - Darren Wall
Assistant - April Seenie