Author Archives: Tara

2016

The Natural & The Manufactured 2016

AUGUST 11 – SEPTEMBER 17
Klondike Institute of Art & Culture
Dawson City, Yukon, Canada

Volcano Collective (Karen Kazmer & Deborah Koenker) | Northern Howl

Kevin Yates & Robert Yates | (migratory) patterns

Opening receptions: Thurs. Aug 11, 7:00pm (part of Yukon Riverside Arts Festival’s Gallery Hop!)
Locations: ODD Gallery and Ruby’s Place

Artist talks: Fri. Aug 12, 7:30pm
Kevin Yates
Deborah Koenker
Karen Kazmer
Location: KIAC Ballroom

Guest lecture: Sat. Aug 13, 7:30pm
Kathleen Ritter: The Sound of North
Location: KIAC Ballroom

Documentation:
The Tour
Post-exhibition responsive essay by Kathleen Ritter

The ODD Gallery and the N&M gratefully acknowledge the generous support of:

IN-GALLERY EXHIBITION:

Volcano Collective (Karen Kazmer & Deborah Koenker) |
Northern Howl: An Installation for Dogs and People
(Vancouver, BC)

Karen Kazmer and Deborah Koenker will research Yukon life and attitudes through face-to-face research, diving into interviews and gathering stories and then reflecting their perceptions back to the community for enjoyment and discussion/dispute.

Their in-gallery installation will start at the ceiling with recreations of Ursa Major and Minor (the bears) and Canis Major and Minor (the dogs). They will populate the gallery below with abstracted sculptures of wolves, dogs, and grizzly bears (a Yukon “species of concern”).

Anecdotal stories, myths and tall tales (manufactured) of dogs, wolves and bears gathered from community participants will be included in Northern Howl as audio recordings.

OFF-SITE EXHIBITION:

Kevin Yates & Robert Yates | migratory (patterns)
(Grafton, ON & Ste. Julienne, QC)

For their off-site exhibition, Robert Yates and Kevin Yates will video-record migratory bird species in Dawson City, and then create video wallpapers from which birds come and go.

The wallpaper patterns will be informed by decorative motifs once popular in the Klondike. The videos will be installed on two separate floors in Ruby’s Place, a historical Parks Canada building. The footage will be edited so that a bird leaving one projection will arrive moments later in the second projection, and vice versa.

Birds migrate across cultural boundaries as if all geographies are home. Through its bird-oriented contemplation of travel, migratory (patterns) presents a new contemplation of global connectivity and human migration.

LECTURE

Kathleen Ritter | The Sound of North
(Toronto, ON / Paris, FR)

As a starting point for a first trip north, Ritter will use the words of Glenn Gould, spoken 50 years ago, and imagine what they would sound like if spoken today:

“I’ve long been intrigued by that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the Arctic and sub-Arctic of our country. I’ve read about it, written about it, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Yet like all but a very few Canadians I’ve had no real experience of the North. I’ve remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North has remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.” — Glenn Gould, Introduction to The Idea of North, 1967

DOCUMENTATION

Kathleen Ritter | Post-exhibition essay

Kathleen Ritter, a curator, artist and critic who works internationally, will evolve her post-exhibition essay from conversations with the exhibiting artists and from her research into perceptions of the North from afar. Ritter’s professional work in Scotland, France, and Canada will give her a unique perspective on the context and environment of the art created and shown through The Natural & The Manufactured.

BIOS

The Volcano Collective: Deborah Koenker and Karen Kazmer

As an immigrant to Canada, Deborah Koenker is interested in borders, globalization, migration/immigration, the difficulties of cultural integration, building community and social justice. She has produced three installations on “disappeared” and murdered girls and women, one of which involved collaboration with 80-some residents in the village of Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico. Personal narratives are increasingly important to her practice; her 2016 Kelowna Art Gallery exhibition Grapes and Tortillas, for example, includes texts written by temporary seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico who come to work on farms, and in vineyards and green houses in the Okanagan Valley, BC and across Canada.

Karen Kazmer’s installations and public artworks are ongoing investigations of architectural space, human and animal interaction, originating from an interest in the body as messenger. She has worked with light, mixed media and technology in producing exhibitions for galleries in Canada and the U.S. Her community based public art projects seek imagery from public workshops, collaborations and on-site activities of people and animals. Recent gallery installations involve the use of sensor-driven pneumatic elements.

Kevin Yates and Robert Yates

Kevin Yates is known for his sculptural works, often highly realized miniatures, doubled to resemble a reflection in water. He likens his work to film stills: objects that hold a “pause” in space, offering the viewer time to examine and inspect. Kevin Yates holds a BFA from NSCAD and an MFA from the University of Victoria, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Art & Art History Department at York University.

Robert Yates employs his film production experience to create video works that first conjure stillness, then morph into multiplying/mirrored images. The slippage between interior and exterior seems constant yet is impossible, since the images reflect layers but will not break open to further layers below.

Kevin Yates and Robert Yates began collaborating in 2011. They blend video, photography and mixed media to construct sculptural/video installations and site-specific projects. They create unnatural dream-like viewing experiences, with uncanny open-ended narratives. The works depict subtle intersections between natural and cultural worlds, leading the viewer to question perspectives and germinate new understandings.

Kathleen Ritter

Ritter is an artist and a curator. She was an artist in residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts International Residencies Program in Visual Arts, in 2013. Working with sound, photography, video, and text, often in collaboration, Ritter has exhibited her work across Canada. She was recently commissioned, along with composer James B. Maxwell, to develop a soundtrack for the international conference Institutions By Artists based on the minutes from the organizers’ board meetings.

Ritter was the Associate Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery until 2012, where she curated the exhibitions How Soon Is Now; Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (with Tania Willard); WE: Vancouver (with Bruce Grenville); Rebecca Belmore: Rising to the Occasion (with Daina Augaitis); and commissioned public artworks for Offsite by Damian Moppett, Kota Ezawa, Elspeth Pratt, and Heather and Ivan Morison.

Garneau, David (Essay)

OUR BETTER NATURES:
ALISON JUDD, DYLAN MINER, AND TERRANCE HOULE FIND HUMAN NATURE IN DAWSON CITY

by DAVID GARNEAU

Dylan Miner, Michif Michin (detail), 2014, photo by Janice Cliff

The rounded mountains, west of Dawson City, Yukon – this is one of the quietest natural places on the planet. Hunched in the light drizzle, pulling berries from low bushes on a smooth slope, I heard the static of rain rhyming with my tinnitus, the gentle rummage of fellow harvesters, and nothing else. Despite the lovely company, the distraction of my task, and the brevity of our visit, I was swept by euphoric calm oscillating with dread. I wanted equally to flee the saturated emptiness and to lose myself in its tranquil embrace. While most people say they want to die among family, there, at that moment, I felt my perfect conclusion to be a dissolve into that quiescence—but not just yet.

It is possible to resist the sublimity of that territory; but you would have to work at it: stay among the buildings and distract yourself with people. I went up last August to do just that—and there are plenty of fascinating buildings and people in Dawson. Tara Rudnickas and the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture invited me to talk about my Roadkill paintings as part of the series The Natural & the Manufactured. I was also there to enjoy the art and company of Terrance Houle and Dylan Miner. I did. But if local artist Bo Yeung hadn’t taken Dylan and me out berry picking, I would have missed the existential awe produced by that unique terrain beyond the town. I would have missed the North.

My visit was just a tongue tip taste of the place, and it got me wondering how it was possible for that summers’ artists in residence—Alison Judd, Dylan Miner, and Terrance Houle, who were there only a few weeks longer—to make aesthetic and relational sense of and with the site and those who live there. However, if a good way to know your territory is to show it to a stranger, a unique and potentially startling way is to invite artists to reflect it back to you.

Dawson City has a population of just over 1,300. The number doubles during tourist season but never swells to the 40,000 who camped there during the gold rush (1896-9). The town is packed between the Yukon River and a hill marked by a gigantic rockslide that the traditional keepers of the territory, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, call “Ëddhä dädhëcha” (“weathered moose hide hanging”). Though the avalanche occurred thousands of years ago, it looks recent, like it could continue its slide into the river, sweeping the town with it. The looming danger makes Dawson look both vulnerable and defiant.

Alison Judd, Living with a Landslide (process), 2014

This perilous backdrop attracted the interest of Guelph-based, Settler artist Alison Judd who made paper casts of some of its rocks and reproduced the slide in the art gallery. Hundreds of grey and white ‘rocks’, some the size of fists but most as big as heads or torsos, tumble from a huge blanket of dyed and sewn sheets of Japanese paper attached to the white wall and onto the grey floor. I was sorry to miss meeting Judd and see her work in person, but, from images of Living with a Landslide (July 3 – August 1), it seems she is negotiating a place between and among nature and culture.

Most European landscape art consists of miniature versions of the outdoors for the indoors. These paintings, photographs, and decorative arts remind us of what is on the other side of our walls, what we have pushed into the background during civilization. While some of these images are sublime, most are pastoral and inviting—reminders of what our homes and cities protect us from, but also what our human natures have lost and long for. Living with a Landslide seems both. It looks like a tiny glacier or a giant, Claes Oldenbergesque, soft bag spilling chunks of white chocolate. If you are in a receptive mood you may feel the power of the avalanche, but are more likely to wonder why the artist manufactured this pale and delicate copy of a monumental actual thing that exists just across town.

Alison Judd, Living with a Landslide (detail), 2014

Living with a Landslide, like most landscape art, captures an aspect of nature, isolates it from the whole, and processes it through imagination and skill to produce something human. Such hand-made objects endeavour to make nature comprehensible through interpretation. Because the installation does not try to fool the eye into thinking it is rock, the work is less about representing an absent thing convincingly than it is about having us think about the artist’s interpretive process. These wrinkled husks ask us not only to imagine their former contents, the rocks, but also the wet hands that caressed these shapes into being. We imagine the artist’s care and her numerous trips up and down the slope, her state of mind: “I need to think slowly and use repetition as a tool to understand change. It is the slow accretion of construction and insight that subsequent elements impose on me – not I on them.” There is a certain conscious mindlessness to much art production. The mind in creation is not empty but features an attention that seems not to belong to its self, its own operations, but instead seems to share intentions with the thing being made. And often when artists echo nature, it feels as though the sight/site is communicating through you. This may be explained away as projection. Whatever it is, it feels as though one is beside oneself, or not one’s self, alone.

Alison Judd, Living with a Landslide, 2015

Another way to consider Judd’s ritualistic making is as haptic magical thinking. Ancient cave painters, religious artists, most artists, paint pictures and carve objects that safely evoke the things they want or fear. Art stills nature (and us) for contemplation. The avalanche looms over Dawson like a potential threat, not just a memory of one. Living with a Landslide both evokes this sleeping giant and (literally) makes light of it.

Dylan Miner’s Michif-Michin (Aug. 14 – Sept. 19) is also a form of landscape art. While he, too, brings the outside in, in his installation and performance the lines between culture and nature, the real and copies, art and life are unstable: medicine rather than magic. Miner converts the gallery into a dining room. The center piece is a big table covered with a blanket. On one wall are dried plants; on another, wooden shelves hold rows of glass and birch-bark containers for teas hand-picked by the artist. On other walls are framed woodcut prints of medicine plants: black currant, blueberry, cranberry, cloudberry, dandelion, fireweed, goldenrod, horsetail, juniper, Labrador tea, lamb’s quarter, raspberry, rosehip, sage, Saskatoon, spruce, wild chamomile, wild onion, willow, and yarrow.

Dylan Miner, Michif Michin (installation), 2014, photo by Janice Cliff

Miner (East Lansing, Michigan) descends from Métis who lived variously in the subarctic, boreal forests, Prairies, and Great Lakes. Much of his work concerns learning and transmitting Indigenous territory and knowledge, especially medicines. Just as Judd’s landslide is a light but tangible echo of the real thing, so too are Miner’s prints ghosts of what they represent. However, there is a poignant vitality and a sense of sacrifice in knowing that the instead of ink the juice of one plant, blackberries, was used to generate the images of the others. Add to this the presence of the actual plants, and their consumption by visitors, and the division between representation and reality collapse: everything is related.

Within and in addition to the installation, Dylan performed The Elders Say We Don’t Visit Anymore, an opportunity for guests to join him for two hours of tea and conversation. The exchanges were engaging and robust. Everyone was eager to share their experiences, knowledge, and companionship. Art, especially contemporary Indigenous performance and relational art, often looks like traditional Indigenous life, compressed and revived. It can be a means to bring former or hidden lives and ways into the present and public. While there is something melancholic about the artificiality having to tart up visiting as art in order to get people involved, the work underlines a certain kind of alienation contemporary culture has constructed, especially between Indigenous and Settler peoples. It was beautiful to see folks equaled and in conversation about what they shared, the land. Stories make territory.

Dylan Miner, The Elders Say We Don’t Visit Anymore, performance, 2014, photo by Dylan Miner

Terrance Houle’s (Blood Tribe) Friend or Foe #5 (July 12 – Aug. 18, 2014) consists of a series of signs scattered throughout Dawson City and a video projection screened at the artists’ residence, Macaulay House. The signs are pictograms of Native American sign language. The messages come from the video, which feature clips of people telling visitors something about their community through Native American sign language. For example, Plains Cree artist and temporary Dawson resident, Charles Atlas Sheppard signs: “Here is ‘Tent City.’ Long time ago 100s of people camped here to work in the white man’s city like the long time ago money days.” An Indigenous woman signs: “One day I called to the Thunder beings. They came and it scared me. I almost crapped. Never doing that again!” And another Indigenous woman: “Here (Yukon) is the safest place if there was ever a zombie apocalypse.”

Terrance Houle, Friend or Foe #5 (sign on 9th Ave trail) 2014

The work is the fifth iteration of an on-going series presented across the Americas where Terrance, in traditional regalia, introduces himself, his territory, and tells stories. Native American sign language was a trade and diplomatic language used through much of the west and center of Turtle Island. In fact, growing up in Blackfoot territory, in Southern Alberta, Terrance saw old folks still using it. Indigenous people past and present, especially on the Plains, are mobile. Territory does not only consist of static places but as spaces people traverse and make into territory by use and by story. By travelling to various places in the Americas, including Dawson, and communicating across cultures, and by having these different folks learn a little of this common language, Terrance temporarily expands his territory, makes himself at home, and others at home with him.

Terrance Houle, Friend or Foe #5 (video stills), 2014

Plains sign language does not belong to one nation. It is a common language belonging to shared territories. Using it links bodies and minds in Indigenous, non-colonial space. Seeing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people use Plains sign language rather than (colonial) English hints at what the future of conciliation might look like.

Reflecting on the experience of picking berries in the drizzle, and through the lens of these art works, I realize that while I am Indigenous, it is not a universal condition with the same meaning in and for all places. I am Métis, indigenous to the Plains, not this North. While participating in an Indigenous activity–(a basic, human one, really) and in Métis company—I had no stories to ground me there or to the peoples of that territory. The feeling that overwhelmed me was a sense of meaninglessness, of being un-storied, of the sublime. I couldn’t wait to get back into town and discourse. Art is part of that discourse. The works of Judd, Miner, and Houle are not about nature as much as they are about us. These artists create hand-made objects and embodied experiences that link us to our human natures.

Regina, July 2015

_______________________________

BIOGRAPHY

DAVID GARNEAU is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. He was born and raised in Edmonton, received most of his post secondary education (BFA Painting and Drawing, MA American Literature) at the University of Calgary and taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design for five years before moving to Regina in 1999.

Garneau’s practice includes painting, drawing, curation and critical writing. His solo exhibition, Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?), toured Canada (2003-7) and Road Kill toured twenty one centers throughout Saskatchewan (2009-11). He is most interested in the collision of nature and culture, metaphysics and materialism, and in contemporary Indigenous identities. His paintings are collected by The Canadian Museum of Civilization; Parliament Buildings; Indian and Inuit Art Collection; The Mackenzie Art Gallery; Mendel Art Gallery; Dunlop Art Gallery; The Glenbow Museum; NONAM, Zurich; Musée de la civilisation, Québec City; City of Calgary; the SaskArts Board; Alberta Foundation for the Arts; Paul Martin foundation; and are in many other public and private collections.

He has curated several large group exhibitions: The End of the World (as we know it); Picture Windows: New Abstraction; Transcendent Squares; Contested Histories; Making it Like a Man!, Graphic Visions, TEXTiles; two person exhibitions: Sophisticated Folk; Reveal/Conceal, and solo shows: Diana Thorneycroft, Tim Moore. Garneau has written numerous catalogue essays and reviews and was a co-founder and co-editor of Artichoke and Cameo magazines. He has recently given talks in Melbourne, Adelaide, New York, San Diego, Sacramento, Saskatoon, and keynote lectures in Sydney, Toronto, Edmonton and Sault Ste Marie. Garneau is currently working on curatorial and writing projects featuring contemporary Indigenous art and curatorial exchanges between Canada and Australia, and is part of a five-year, SSHRC funded curatorial research project, “Creative Conciliation.”

www.davidgarneau.com

Lyons, Colin

COLIN LYONS | TIME MACHINE FOR ABANDONED FUTURES

August 8 – 16, 2015
Site-specific installation: Midnight Dome

Opening Night: Thursday, August 13
Artist talk at 7PM in the KIAC Ballroom | Reception and shuttle to follow

PROJECT STATEMENT
During my first visit to Dawson, in January 2010, I was driven up to the dome to look out at the vast intestinal tailing piles left by decades of dredging in the area. For me, this vista became the lasting image of my trip to the Yukon. In a town that boasts many historical monuments, these tailings seemed to represent the ‘authentic’ ruins of the Klondike gold rush.

Over the past several years, my work has focused on the remnants left behind in the wake of our industrial pursuits, and how we can preserve, memorialize, or simply move beyond the weight of these remains. In these works, I fuse printmaking, sculpture, and chemical experiments in exploring industry through the lens of fragility and impermanence, pushing printmaking beyond its traditional boundaries, as a re-enactment of the boom and bust cycles of industrial economies.

This project began with a quintessentially Klondike activity – a kind of treasure hunting. Over the course of several weeks, I walked along the dredge tailings, using a metal detector to excavate industrial cast-offs, amassing a substantial collection of rusted metal tools and fragments.

Colin Lyons walking the dredge tailings, looking for artifacts, July 2015

With this collection in tow, I brought it to the midnight dome, where I installed my Time Machine; a strange off-the-grid laboratory which became my home for a few weeks. Built with plexiglas, aluminum, and chemicals, this shelter adopts a design similar to Earthship architecture, but rather than environmental sustainability as its guiding principle, this bubbling chemical structure comes closer to the absurd inefficiency of many of our modern industrial pursuits. Powering this machine is a massive, roof-top battery, in which etching plates and etching acid power an electrolytic cleaning process to remove the rust from my scavenged artifacts. Once cleaned, I meticulously etched the markings left by decades of rust and erosion, forming a kind of topographical map. The result is a glistening surface that memorializes the artifact’s entire lifespan.

Overlooking the dredge tailings, this machine presents a kind of prototype for the preservation of degradation. As it stands now, our most sincere attempts to preserve this era are often counterproductive, a further erasure or gentrifying of these objects and spaces, resulting in a kind of nostalgic industrial utopia. With this project, I attempt to reintroduce the evidence of time, erosion and labour into the restoration process: the act of polishing bringing a sharpened awareness to the work that was once performed with these tools.

COLIN LYONS grew up in ‘Canada’s original oil boomtown’ of Petrolia, Ontario, an experience that has fueled his interests in industrial ruins and sacrificial landscapes. His recent work fuses printmaking, sculpture, and chemical experiments, pushing the role of the etching plate beyond traditional uses to create re-enactments of the rise and fall of industrial economies.

Lyons received his BFA from Mount Allison University (2007) and MFA in printmaking from University of Alberta (2012). His work has been shown in solo exhibitions across Canada, and in group exhibitions internationally. He has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec, and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, among others. Exhibitions include projects presented at Platform Stockholm (Stockholm, Sweden), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), OBORO (Montreal, QC), SPACES (Cleveland, OH), CIRCA art actual (Montreal, QC) Centre[3] (Hamilton, ON), aceartinc. (Winnipeg, MB) and artcite (Windsor, ON).

Lyons currently lives in Iowa City, where he holds the Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at The University of Iowa.

Murphy, Kevin

KEVIN MURPHY | ONE SQUARE INCH MORE OR LESS

August 13 – September 18, 2015
ODD Gallery

Opening Night: Thursday, August 13
Artist talk at 7PM in the KIAC Ballroom | Gallery Reception to follow

promo_deed_thumbnail

PROJECT STATEMENT
In 1955, the Quaker Oats Company launched the Klondike Big Inch Land Co. promotion. Accompanying boxes of puffed cereal, consumers received elaborate and apparently official deeds to one square inch of land subdivided from a plot outside of Dawson City. Capitalizing on romanticized notions of the North at the turn of the century, the promotion was a tie-in to Quakerʼs sponsored television show Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and explicitly framed the titles in the context of the Klondike Gold Rush. Slogans such as “Get Free Gold Rush Land Today!” were wildly successful in capturing children’s imaginations and encouraging cereal sales. 21 million deeds were drawn up and rapidly claimed in a strange echo of the earlier rush.

More valuable than other cereal prizes, many of the deeds were saved through the years. However, they were never intended to have real property value. Quaker had considered the cost of so many land transfers unfeasible, and none were ever registered. To make matters worse, in 1965 the land was repossessed for non-payment of $37.20 in taxes. Over the last 60 years, generations of deed holders who didn’t read the fine print have contacted various administrative bodies, only to be redirected to Quaker and subsequently disappointed. The response from Quakerʼs legal department was that, “the real value of the deeds was based on the romantic appeal of being a property owner in the Great Yukon Territory rather than on any intrinsic value of a one-inch square of property.”[1]

Plotting the lots on today’s survey plans (detail)

So the land was real land, but was never truly intended to exist anywhere except as an idea in the consumerʼs mind. This confusion, and the tension between the various partiesʼ expectations, nicely opens up the complicated relationship between land and landscape- between a physical place and the accumulated human and social lenses through which we view it.

Now fully detached from the land that they signify, Klondike Big Inch deeds are readily available for sale online. Revisiting this bizarre property and settlement microcosm, I have been collecting these deeds for the last year. While in Dawson, my project has involved locating each corresponding one-inch land parcel using survey plans and GPS. Using the physical deeds themselves as the material for tiny paper sculptures, I have built camps, homesteads, claims, and the various other built objects and environments of this second imaginary Gold Rush. Photographed on their respective lots, the scale of the resulting landscapes is confused, allowing the sculptures to become models for larger potential sites. In the end, I see the exhibited project as a complementary paradox: the imagined space of the deed finally made real by its location and documentation, and the real space of the land made imaginary- transformed into model, picture, and landscape.

[1] Quoted in Arthur F. Marquette, Brands, Trademarks and Good Will: The Story of the Quaker Oats Company (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967) 121.

KEVIN MICHAEL MURPHY is a Vancouver-based artist working primarily in three dimensions, using a variety of materials, often in combination with pre-existing systems, cycles, or organisms. From his contemporary urban perspective, and against a backdrop of growing environmental crises, Murphy explores the ways that humans interact with the living world around them in material, economic, and imaginative terms.

Murphy received his BFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver in 2009, and went on to work there for a number of years as UBC’s Drawing, Painting & Sculpture Technician. Past projects have included Atlantean Timepiece for UNIT/PITT Projects’ What Future series, and New Xanadu at the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research. This September he will begin his MFA at the University of Guelph.

kevinmichaelmurphy.ca

2015

The Natural & The Manufactured 2015

Klondike Institute of Art & Culture
Dawson City, Yukon, Canada

August 13 – September 18, 2015

1. EXHIBITIONS

KEVIN MURPHY | ONE SQUARE INCH MORE OR LESS
ODD Gallery Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 13, 7PM, KIAC Ballroom
Gallery Reception to follow

COLIN LYONS | TIME MACHINE FOR ABANDONED FUTURES
Outdoor Site-specific Installation (Midnight Dome)
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 13, 7PM, KIAC Ballroom
Reception & free shuttle to Midnight Dome to follow

Scheduled shuttles to the Midnight Dome will provided by Husky Bus during Discovery Days weekend (August 14 – 16). Visit the gallery for more info.

2. LECTURE

DR. CURTIS COLLINS | MANUFACTURED NOT NATURAL
Friday, August 14th, 7 PM in the KIAC Ballroom

3. DOCUMENTATION

COURTNEY HOLMES | TRACES OF INDUSTRY

The Natural & the Manufactured post-exhibition essay

Conversation with Terrance Houle, Dylan Miner, David Garneau

A CONVERSATION ON CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS ART
with Terrance Houle, Dylan Miner and David Garneau

Photo by Michael Maclean

Sunday, August 17th at Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre
Doors at 2:00 PM, discussion begins at 2:15 PM

Using the ODD Gallery’s ongoing exhibition series the Natural & the Manufactured as their starting point, internationally recognized Indigenous artists Terrance Houle (Kainai/Ojibwe), Dylan Miner (Metis), and David Garneau (Metis) discuss the state of Indigenous contemporary art in relationship to their own artistic practices.

Garneau, David

DAVID GARNEAU | ROAD KILL WILD-LIFE ART AND MÉTIS IMAGINATION: AN ILLUSTRATED ARTIST TALK

Friday, August 15, 7:30 PM in the KIAC Ballroom

This philosophical, poetic, and occasionally humorous, illustrated artist talk considers wild life art as the anthropomorphic expression of our desire for family and freedom; roadkill as spiritual objects; the ditch as a site of existential and spatial anxiety; and how the Métis experience shapes the Plains landscape.

www.davidgarneau.com

Miner, Dylan

DYLAN MINER | MICHIF – MICHIN

[portfolio_slideshow]

August 14 – September 19, 2014
Opening Night: Thursday, August 14
Artist talk at 7:30PM in the KIAC Ballroom | Reception to follow

This new body of work will investigate Métis medicine. As the descendent of Métis from across the subarctic and boreal forests to the prairies and Great Lakes, I am intimately interested in the physical and spiritual capabilities of Indigenous medicines. Recent events, including the #idlenomore movements, the Daniels’ Decision (and Canada’s legal battle against this decision), and the land claim decision in favor of the Manitoba Métis Federation, have reinvigorated our
society’s desire to look at various healing practices. This projects does exactly that.

Since, my great-grandmother was known for her ability to make healing salves (as well as for her beadwork and oatmeal cookies), I have a familial relationship to Métis medicine and its ability to heal. Michin – Michif, as this project is called, uses traditional plants as its starting point. From this initial moment of creation, I think of healing in complex and multidimensional ways. The title of this project plays on the linguistic similarities between the Métis word for medicine (michif) and the word we use to describe our language and ourselves (Michif).
Accordingly, I will focus extensively on language and herbal remedies as the core to community healing.

The Elders Say We Don’t Visit Anymore, Tea and Conversation with Dylan Miner
Friday & Saturday, August 15 &16, 2:00 – 4:00 PM in the gallery

Ongoing Tea and Conversation
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm & Saturdays 1 – 5pm in the gallery

DYLAN MINER (Métis) is Associate Professor at Michigan State University, where he coordinates a new Indigenous Contemporary Art Initiative. He holds a PhD from the University of New Mexico and has published more than fifty journal articles, book chapters, critical essays and encyclopedia entries. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). Since 2010, he has been featured in thirteen solo exhibitions and been artist-in-residence at institutions such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, École supérieure des beaux-arts in Nantes and Santa Fe Art Institute. His work has been the subject of articles in publications including ARTnews, Indian Country Today, First American Art Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian and Chicago Sun-Times. Miner is descended from the Miner-Brissette-L’Hirondelle-Kennedy families with ancestral ties to Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes, Prairies and subarctic regions.

http://www.dylanminer.com/

Houle, Terrance

TERRANCE HOULE | FRIEND OR FOE #5 (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City)

[portfolio_slideshow]

August 14 – September 19, 2014
Opening Night: Thursday, August 14
Artist talk at 7:30PM in the KIAC Ballroom | Reception to follow

Friend or Foe is an ongoing performance/ installation series spanning across the Americas, using Native American Sign Language & Signals to communicate personal/general stories, history, time travel, myths, legends, life and diverse points of view. Houle will be creating a performance installation using local environments, buildings, historical and local sites with the help of participants from the area. The final product will be a walking hiking tour to significant places to enact stories told by the local, historical, traditional indigenous people of the area. This piece will connect with the other series that have been created in South America, Quebec, Alberta, Ontario, & British Columbia.

Friend or Foe Projections by Terrance Houle
Thursday – Sunday, August 14 – 17, beginning at 7:00 PM at the Macaulay House

Friend or Foe Walking Tour / Performance with Terrance Houle
Saturday & Sunday, August 15 & 16, 4:00 PM (meet at the ODD Gallery)

Video and map for outdoor installations available in the gallery

TERRANCE HOULE is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe. Involved with Aboriginal communities all his life, he has traveled to reservations throughout North America participating in Powwow dancing along with his native ceremonies. Houle utilizes at his discretion performance, photography, video/film, music and painting. Likewise Houle’s practice includes tools of mass dissemination such as billboards and vinyl bus signage.

A graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, Terrance Houle received his B.F.A in 2003. His groundbreaking art quickly garnered him significant accolades and opportunities, including the 2003 invitation to participate in the Thematic Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in. This Residency focused on 34 international indigenous people exploring issues of colonization and communion. Houle received the 2006 Enbridge Emerging Artist Award presented at the Mayors Luncheon for the Arts, City Of Calgary. After receiving many screenings of his short video/film work at the Toronto 2004 ImagineNATIVE Film Festival, Houle was awarded winner of Best Experimental Film. His work has been exhibited across Canada, Parts of the United States, Australia, Europe and England.

Recently, Terrance Houle’s work was represented in his first “Major Solo Exhibition” GIVN’R opening at PLUG-IN Institute for Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba, GIVN”R is a small retro exhibition of Terrance’s works in film, video, performance, installation, mixed media, and photography between 2003-2009.

Terrance Houle lives and maintains his art practice and is a founding member of Indigeneity Artist Collective Society.

www.terrancehouleart.com/

Judd, Alison

ALISON JUDD | LIVING WITH A LANDSLIDE

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July 3 – August 1, 2014
Opening Night: Thursday, July 3rd
Artist talk at 7:30PM in the KIAC Ballroom | Reception to follow

Alison Judd is an artist working in printmaking and installation. Her work makes evident her ruminations on transience, impermanence, loss and landscape as she thinks about time, the distance between individuals and the erosion of our relationship with the environment.

The Moosehide Slide is evidence of a landslide that serves as a backdrop to daily life in Dawson City. It is an ancient landslide that the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in call “Ëddhä dädhëcha”, which literally means “weathered moosehide hanging”.

In the gallery installation Living with a Landslide, Alison Judd has brought the landslide into town and into the gallery. Working with handmade and Japanese papers she has ‘collected’ the rocks by walking to the slide daily and taking paper castings. The artist is interested in this place where the sudden movement of the earth is evident because it allows exploration of time and its implication for both our personal and natural ecologies.

Working slowly, repetitively with her hands and body are important aspects of the work. “I need to think slowly and use repetition as a tool to understand change. It is the slow accretion of construction and insight that subsequent elements impose on me – not I on them”.

alisonjuddwork.com/

Alison Judd is a Guelph based artist. She earned a diploma from Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, and obtained my Masters of Fine Art at York University in Toronto.

She teaches printmaking at the Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU) and at the University of Guelph.