The Moosehorn Statues of Armand Lemiez

Manitobans have a penchant for constructing statues and monuments to mark their community, but none reach the levels of obsession, and, often, creativity, of those in the Interlake.

From a giant curling rock in Arborg to a massive concrete Viking in the Icelandic community of Gimli, we do them odd and we do them large. Komarno, a community of fewer than 100 people, boasts the largest mosquito in the world. Nearby, Inwood brags about its hundreds of thousands of red-sided garter snakes with a stone and mortar creation of intertwined snakes. Petersfield has the newest statue – a twenty-foot mallard duck on the wing, while Poplarfield features a giant “King Buck” deer. Selkirk’s catfish, Ashern’s sharptail grouse, Lundar’s Canada Goose and Stonewall’s stone quarry edifice are among others in this microcosm of the province. But Armand Lemiez, a lifelong bachelor farmer in the Moosehorn area in the mid 1900s, outdoes them all.

A prolific oils painter in his spare time, Armand turned his attention to concrete statue building in the 1960s and 1970s, hoping to immortalize himself and his community with his innovative statues. The statues were formed on rough metal frames constructed of scrap material, then the concrete was mixed, poured and shaped by hand. Over a decade, he produced approximately two figures per year. One approaches fifty feet in size. They consisted of lifesize (or larger than life-sized) human, mythological and prehistoric creatures.

In 1980, at the age of eighty-five, Armand began attempting to have his art memoralized, and approached the Canadian and provincial governments to have his works officially recognized. He failed, being told that his works had no significant cultural value. While it is true that they do not appear artistically refined, his statues reflect a unique cultural take on rural living and speak of the imagination of this solitary farmer from the Interlake. Ironically, after his death, a few of the remaining relatives attempted to keep people from visiting the remote farm to view the statues, as they feared both lawsuits and damage to the property.  While the frequent school outings to visit the site were terminated, the community did make an effort to restore some of the decaying art, but were unsuccessful.

Armand Lemiez died in 1984, and his legacy, too, is returning to dust. Vandals and nature have undone much of what he had attempted to achieve, but evidence of his spirit still remains. He may be the pioneer of the Interlake’s statue building zeal, and Moosehorn can lay claim to being the birthplace of the region’s explosion of concrete memorials and markers.