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2018

The Natural & The Manufactured 2018

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

August 16 – September 22, 2018

INFO/FLOE

JOSH WINKLER
(ODD Gallery)

LINDSAY DOBBIN in collaboration with ANGIE JOSEPH-REAR, MICHELLE OLSON, MATTHEW MORGAN (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens) & SHARON MAUREEN VITTREKWA (Tetlit Gwich’in citizen)
(Offsite: 88.8FM at ODD Gallery,Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre and the Old Post Office)

CURATED BY MICHAEL MCCORMACK

 


Exhibition Reception & Opening Remarks: 
Thurs. Aug 16th, 7:30pm
part of the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival

Location: ODD Gallery

Artist Talk with Josh Winkler: Friday. Aug  18, 7:30pm
Location: KIAC Ballroom
The talk will present a brief trajectory of the artist’s work, their recent Chilkoot Trail Residency experience, and finish, by discussing a new collection of works created in Dawson for KIAC’s ODD Gallery exhibition.

Curator’s Talk: Sat. Aug 19, 7pm
Location: KIAC Ballroom
Curator Michael McCormack discusses the approaches of both participating artists in this year’s exhibition INFO/FLOE. Through discussing this project he hopes to further understand our complicated and problematic relationships with the environment and promote media literacy, cultural production, and public access to an extensive variety of media. In what ways do we remain connected with each each other throughout generations, across vast distances, through remote sensing, skill-sharing, mark making, collective human memory, and experiential learning? How have all forms of media been utilized or exploited to communicate through time and distance?

Off-site audio installation: 88.8FM
Locations: ODD Gallery, Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, the Old Post Office (3rd & King)
Receive Transmit Receive Transmit involves artist Lindsay Dobbin working remotely from the Bay of Fundy, connecting with three Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens – Elder Angie Joseph-Rear, Michelle Olson and Matthew Morgan – over a vast distance in order to share land-based knowledge and experience together, finding resonance between two places — the Yukon River and the intertidal zone of the Bay of Fundy. Improvised actions emerged out of collaborative listening, some of which leave temporal traces in the landscape. The project explores how
kinship with land can be deepened through sharing and how the space between places can disappear through the combined use of modern technologies and the original form of communication: speaking to the land.

Three lo-fi transmitters are installed throughout town: at the ODD Gallery, Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre and the Old Post Office. Each transmitter is broadcasting to 88.8 FM, and features conversations Dobbin had with the three local collaborators.
Borrow a radio receiver, tune to 88.8 FM, and walk the land — listening to the environment and the dialogue between two places. Also be aware of residue in the landscape from these exchanges. The route is up to you.

We’re grateful to Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation for being continuous stewards of this land, and for welcoming this project.

CFYT 106.9FM: CONVERSATIONS with the artists and curator
Throughout the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival tune in to CFYT 106.9 FM to listen to conversations between The Natural & The Manufactured Curator Michael McCormack and artists Lindsay Dobbin and Josh Winkler.

Commissioned Text: by Exhibition Curator Michael McCormack
Fall 2018

 


INFO/FLOE
is a project that brings together work from two methodologies of communicating with the land as archive; through listening and performance, and through synthetic reproduction of found objects. It considers the impermanence and malleability of information, language, experience and storytelling, through time-based, and print-based media. Josh Winkler, and Lindsay Dobbin have developed practices that deeply consider our relationships as stewards, protectors, active communicators and archivists of the natural environment.

During the Natural & the Manufactured residency in the summer of 2018, Dobbin and Winkler will create and present new works that continue their practice of deep listening, research, and correlation with the land, considering the natural environment as an active storyteller, performer, archivist, and foundation to our survival as a species. The final presentation will cumulate during the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival with an installation of Winkler’s work in the ODD Gallery and a temporary performance and a site-specific radio installation of Dobbin’s work with local collaborators.

Involving participatory performance, sound, and installation, Dobbin’s work is ecocentric, using listening as wayfinding. Their work intends to deepen our relationship with the natural world, and bridge our relationships with the natural environment that have been fragmented and scattered through colonization and industrialization.

Josh Winkler’s work involves in-depth research and consideration of materials that are found in the area of the Klondike, recorded and reproduced as manufactured objects. Through bringing these objects into the gallery setting, Winkler intersects his studio work with installation work, bringing materials gathered from his walks and hikes into a place of critical contemplation, thus problematizing, and opening a conversation that reconsiders objects of “historic significance”.

Throughout this project, both artists have been carefully considering the flow of information and how it is experienced, and eventually absorbed by our physical surroundings. It is an opportunity to reflect on how all forms of information intake influences our memories that are passed on through artifact, recorded information, environmental evidence, storytelling, or art making.

– Michael McCormack 2018

 

 

BIOGRAPHIES

JOSH K. WINKLER is a Minnesota artist working primarily with traditional and contemporary print media. Since receiving his MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2010, Josh has been creating works on paper, running a small gallery, building a stone cabin, and exhibiting work nationally and internationally. He is currently an Associate Professor of Printmaking at Minnesota State University in Mankato, Minnesota. Winkler’s work stems from an interest in how humans manipulate and label the land. How time, politics, and social change alter the context of both natural and inhabited locations. By combining personal experience with historical investigation, Winkler builds layered landscape narratives to reflect on an uncomfortable disconnect between contemporary Americans and the history of the land. He utilizes a range of drawing, printmaking, and sculptural processes to facilitate these ideas.
http://joshkwinkler.com


LINDSAY DOBBIN
is a Mohawk – Acadian – Irish artist, musician, curator and educator who lives and works on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the L’nu. Born in and belonging to the Kennebecasis River Valley in New Brunswick, Dobbin has lived throughout the Maritimes as well as the Yukon Territory. Dobbin’s place-responsive practice includes music, media art, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing, and is invested in and influenced by Indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices, such as drumming. Through placing listening, collaboration and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin’s practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land.
www.lindsaydobbin.com

 

MICHAEL MCCORMACK is an intermedia artist, curator, and educator of settler ancestry living in unceded territory of the Mi’Kmaq people in K’jiputuk (Halifax). He has worked extensively within the artist-run centre community as Director of Eyelevel Gallery from 2009-2013 and president and representative of the Association of Artist-Run Centres from the Atlantic from 2011-2013. He continues to work as an independent curator for exhibitions, festivals and events, most recently for Nocturne: Art at Night (2016), Flotilla Atlantic (2017), INTERPL/\Y (2017), and KIAC’s the Natural & the Manufactured exhibition (2018). Michael completed his MFA at NSCAD University in 2015 and has been steadily exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions in public galleries, festivals, and artist-run centres  since 2003 and is currently a member of Last Chants Studio, At The Reception and Hermes Gallery in Halifax, NS.
www.michaeldmccormack.com

 

Images: Lindsay Dobbin, Intertidal Cymbal Works – Receive Transmit, Performance, 2018
Josh Winkler,  Klondike Tailings (detail) Color woodcut in 6 parts, 68”x120”, 2018

 

2017

The Natural & The Manufactured 2017

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

1. EXHIBITIONS

August 17 – September 23, 2017

LISA HIRMER & LEILA ARMSTRONG | TALL TALES FOR SHORT NIGHTS AND WARM PLANETS
CURATED BY MARLAINA BUCH

Opening Reception: Thurs. Aug 17, 7:00pm (part of Yukon Riverside Arts Festival’s Gallery Hop!)
Location: ODD Gallery

A collaborative, theatrical research project using tall tales of animal encounters collected from the community. Tall Tales for Short Nights and Warm Planets consists of drawings, photographs and performance created by Lisa Hirmer and Leila Armstrong over the course of a 6-week residency in Dawson City.

Performance: Tall Tales for Campfires: Thurs. Aug  17, 10:00pm
Location: Front Street Fire Pit

The Natural & the Manufactured residency artists Lisa Hirmer and Leila Armstrong will be telling tall tales around the campfire at the First Avenue fire pit (at the foot of Princess Street). Get ready to hear some stories loosely based on local animal encounters and perhaps share some of your own yarns. (Weather permitting. Please feel free to bring your own lawn chairs or blankets for seating)

Artist Talk: Sat. Aug 19, 7pm
Lisa Hirmer
Leila Armstrong
Panel Discussion with Marlaina Buch to follow
Location: KIAC Ballroom

The Natural & the Manufactured residency artists Lisa Hirmer and Leila Armstrong will present artist talks followed by a panel discussion with exhibition curator Marlaina Buch. Each artist will give a brief overview of their practice leading up to Tales for Short Nights and Warm Planets, and their work in the exhibition, on display in the ODD Gallery until September 23, 2017.

Curator’s Talk August 17th, 6:30pm
Location: KIAC Ballroom

Can we ever know *the secret internal stirrings of animals?* or are they inherently unknowable? What does it mean to meet a creature’s eyes? With differences in communication ability, perception, eyesight, biological priorities, and appropriate responses, how can we be sure of what’s really going on when we chance upon a wild citizen? Curator Marlaina Buch’s talk invites participants to toss around ideas about animal encounters and what they can tell us about ourselves.

Commissioned Text by Exhibition Curator Marlaina Buch

Narrative accounts of human/animal interactions are complex records. Encounter tales starring animals trend tall. Recollections of brief meetings between species are frequently spectacular, and carry in them ideas about humanity and our place in the world. In these tellings, animals are often symbols, omens, scapegoats, or guides to our wilder selves. Our inability to fully understand creatures that don’t use the same systems as us (language chiefly, but also gesture and expression) creates a gap easily filled with conjecture. To meet another creature’s eyes feels significant, meaningful – “It looked right at me.” Storytelling transforms sightings with the desires, fears, and imaginings of the narrator, frequently revealing more about the reporter than the subject.

Wild animals are mysterious and charismatic, they arrest our attention in the moments we share with them. Animals are indicators of seasonality, abundance (or scarcity), migration patterns, and changes in the biological condition of an ecosystem. Animal sightings connect us to the wider environmental web, acting as a gateway to noticing other subtler natural communities of plants, insects, fungi, rocks, and elements. Falling in love with a magnificent owl could make you curious about its home, what it eats, where it sleeps. You might spend more time trying to see one, looking for signs of its presence, listening for its call, wandering around at dusk. You might see other secretive, magical things happen when you walk in the woods. This attention can broaden the knowledge base of how creatures behave and what new pressures act upon them. If people don’t spend time on the land, ears pricked, eyes scanning, the environmental memories of previous generations are foreshortened. If comparative changes in the natural world aren’t recorded and transmitted to a population that sticks around, there is less cause for alarm when things shift. The baseline of what’s normal in the natural world shrinks to a few seasons, a few stories.

Artists Leila Armstrong and Lisa Hirmer are spending 6 weeks in Dawson City collecting stories of animal encounters from locals, tourists, and transients. These tales will inform the creation of new artworks based on community research and collaboration. As with any sample, certain themes have already recurred. The recent appearance of species uncommon to northerly climes has been noted, as has the necessity of bartering with sassy ravens. In Dawson, bears fall from trees and plastic deer walk down the main drag. It’s a unique town. These are unique stories. By teasing out ideas about who we are relative to “nature”, these artists ask if new rituals can be created to orient ourselves within the natural world.  (click for full text)

BIOGRAPHIES

Lisa Hirmer an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans social practice, visual media, performance, community collaboration and experimental forms of publishing. Working under the pseudonym DodoLab, she explores the complicated nature of public opinion and the public life of ideas. In her photo- based work she studies the forces that transform ecological systems and human relationships with the more-than-human world. She has shown her work across Canada and internationally including at Confederation Centre of the Arts, Harbourfront Centre, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Peninsula Arts (U.K.), Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), CAFKA (Kitchener-Waterloo) and Flux Factory (USA). She was recently commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario to create a new work in response to the sesquicentennial as part of Every.Now.Then. Recent residencies include Time_Place_Space by Arts House (Australia), the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Hirmer is a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and is currently based in Guelph, Canada.
dodolab.ca

 

Leila Armstrong has an M.A. in Media Studies from Concordia University. She works both independently and in collaboration with other artists such as Chai Duncan (in 12 Point Buck) and Darcy Logan, Maria Madacky, and Rick Gillis (in M.E.D.I.U.M.).  Her most recent solo exhibition was “Coyote,” a body of work addressing the intersection of wildlife with rural, suburban, and urban spaces. Her interest in traditional natural history methodologies and their intersection with drawing and printmaking has led her to her current focus on those methods. Armstrong also organizes bi-annual community-based exhibitions titled“Cabinet of Queeriosities” that celebrate LGBTQ history, identity, culture and pride through a diverse range of subject matters and approaches.
leilaarmstrong.blogspot.ca

 

Marlaina Buch makes art, writes, organizes exhibitions, facilitates community projects and falls somewhere on the arts spectrum between maker and doer. She has a background in art education and public engagement and her practice uses creative education, experiential and collaborative workshops, typography, printmaking, critical writing and performance to investigate social and environmental challenges, absurdity, and the potential of public space. She lives in Nanaimo BC.
www.marlainabuch.com


Leila Armstrong  | Ravens, ink on paper, 30 “x 22”, 2017

Lisa Hirmer  |  A Glassiness to the Eyes, archival inkjet print, 80″ x 20″, 2017


Leila Armstrong  | Bear Falling Out Of Tree, ink on paper, 30 “x 22”, 2017

Lisa Hirmer |  Certainties to Which We’ve Become Accustomed, detail, archival inkjet print 30″ x 24″, 2017

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:

partnership_logo_black WEB_N&M_odd_logos2

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.

VolcanoCollective_bear shadows study

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.

Yates + Yates_Ruby's downstair

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.

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

 

 

2014

The Natural & The Manufactured 2014

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

1. EXHIBITIONS

PLATFORM 01:
July 3 – August 1, 2014

Alison Judd | Living with a Landslide
Gallery Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, July 3, 7:30pm, ODD Gallery
Reception to follow

 

PLATFORM 02:
August 14 – September 19, 2014

Dylan Miner |MICHIF-MICHIN
Gallery Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 14, 7:30pm, ODD Gallery
Reception to follow

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


Terrance Houle | Friend or Foe #5 (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City)
Outdoor Site-specific Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 14, 7:30pm, ODD Gallery
Reception to follow

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)

2. PROJECTS

David Garneau | Road Kill Wild-Life Art and Métis Imagination:
An Illustrated Artist Talk
Friday, August 15th, 7:30 PM in the KIAC Ballroom


A Conversation on Contemporary Indigenous Art
with Terrance Houle, Dylan Miner and David Garneau
Sunday, August 17th, 2:00PM at Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre

3. DOCUMENTATION

Post Exhibition Essay by David Garneau

 

 

NATURAL AND THE MANUFACTURED 2013

THE NATURAL AND THE MANUFACTURED 2013 

August 15 – September 20, 2013

The Natural & The Manufactured is a unique thematic project jointly organized by the ODD Gallery and the Artist in Residence Program at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture. Conceived as a speculative research and presentation forum, the N&M looks to the myriad ways in which we both influence and are influenced by our natural and constructed environments.

The Natural & The Manufactured 2013 — the ODD Gallery’s 9th annual edition of the project—features the work of four diverse participants. The ODD Gallery is pleased to present a site-specific outdoor installation by Sarah Fuller (Banff, AB), an ODD Gallery sculpturalinstallation by Paul Griffin (Sackville, NB), a lecture by poet Robert Bringhurst (Quadra Island, BC), and a commissioned critical text by writer and visual artist Meg Walker (Dawson City, YT).

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

1. EXHIBITIONS

SARAH FULLER | THE HOMECOMING
Outdoor installation
Opening night tour: Thursday, August 15th, 9:30 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, August 16th, 8:30 PM

PAUL GRIFFIN | WELCOME STRANGER
ODD Gallery Exhibition
Opening reception: Thursday, August 15th, 7 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, August 16th, 8:30 PM

2. LECTURE

ROBERT BRINGHURST | “THE FACTS WILL FORM A POEM IN YOUR MINDS”: THE REAL AND THE ARTIFICIAL IN ART AND NATURE
Saturday, August 17th, 6:30 PM in the KIAC Ballroom

3. DOCUMENTATION

MEG WALKER | POST-EXHIBITION ESSAY
To be published September 2013

_______

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Fuller_Dubois Residence

Image: Sarah Fuller, Dubois Residence, 2012.

SARAH FULLER  |  THE HOMECOMING
Outdoor Installation
Opening Tour: Thursday, August 15th, 9:30 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, August 16th, 8:30 PM

The historical town of Bear Creek, YT is situated approximately 12 km outside of Dawson City and was the former company town for Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation. It has been abandoned since the mid-1960s and is now maintained by Parks Canada as a National Historic Site. Many of the residential buildings have been transported from their original site in Bear Creek to Dawson City, and all that remains of their presence in the original site are their foundations.

In the outdoor installation The Homecoming, Sarah Fuller has re-inserted five of the buildings back into their former place of residence via large-scale photographic prints on linen. These prints are manipulated using theatre techniques once used by Daguerre in the Paris Diorama in the mid 1850s, and will see the houses shift from dusk to night. The artist seeks to create a sense of home in the structures, as well as a visual play on memory, ghosts and history.

In tandem to the installation at Bear Creek, five signs will be placed around Dawson in front of the buildings where they currently stand today. Each sign will have a short history of the residence and its connection to Bear Creek.

 
 
Griffin detail

Image: Paul Griffin, Sarcophagus for an Elm, 2012.

PAUL GRIFFIN  |  WELCOME STRANGER
ODD Gallery Installation
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 15th, 7 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, August 16th, 8:30 PM

Griffin will install a large-scale sculptural installation in the ODD Gallery that explores the relationship between human desire and heavy industry that has driven Dawson City’s development over the past century.

As described by its organic contours, Welcome Stranger references the world’s largest known gold nugget, discovered in Australia in 1869, and the Chinese scholar stone, a prized eastern object known for its metaphysical properties. Throughout their history, both of these natural forms have provided sites for the intersection of spiritual aesthetics and financial value, driven by the internal need for the heroic quest and eternal contemplation. Using thousands of ordinary construction screws to carve out the work’s material form, Griffin’s ghostly installation will depict the nugget constantly sought but rarely attained.

Reiffel Bird Sanctuary, March 1996

ROBERT BRINGHURST  |  “THE FACTS WILL FORM A POEM IN YOUR MINDS”: THE REAL AND THE ARTIFICIAL IN ART AND NATURE
Saturday, August 18th, 6:30 PM in the KIAC Ballroom

The great (and almost wholly self-educated) British physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, lecturing on the properties of metals at the Royal Institute, London, in December 1858, said “I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.” Many artists and writers, as well as many first-rate scientists and mathematicians, have had that experience, of the facts forming a poem in their minds. Why is it, then, that we speak so often of poets, writers and artists as people who make things, or who make them up, though we are happy to say that scientists discover things? If the facts form a poem, do they really only form it in your mind or do they also form a poem – a radiant, resonant order – out there in the world? Is the poem of the facts real, or do we have to dream it up? Were the poets William Butler Yeats and Marianne Moore, when they spoke of “literalists of the imagination,” speaking of artifice or of reality, or of both?

 

2013 Artists in Residence

THE NATURAL AND THE MANUFACTURED 2013 is now underway!

KIAC welcomes resident artists Sarah Fuller and Paul Griffin to Dawson City.

sarah_webSarah Fuller (July 5, 2013 – August 26, 2013)

Sarah Fuller is a Banff- based artist working in photography, installation and video. Her work is about multiple levels of perception, reality and narrative. In the last few years this has manifested in multi-disciplinary installation work combining photography, video and text. Place take a central role, often with personal experience as a starting point. Sarah often thinks about vantage point and an experiential view of physical and psychological landscape.

During her residency in Dawson, Sarah will be creating a site-specific installation in the historical Bear Creek site, utilizing large-scale photographs and theatrical lighting. This work is part of the Natural and Manifactured thematic residency.

Sarah was born in Winnipeg, MB. She earned a BFA from the Emily Carr University in Vancouver in 2003 after completing her first two years of study at the University of Manitoba, School of Fine Arts. Her work is held in public and private collections across Canada, including the Canada Council for the Arts Art Bank, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Cenovus Energy.

Currently Sarah is showing work in the exhibit Wish You Were Here at the Union Gallery, Kingston. In 2013, she was part of The News from Here: The 2013 Alberta Biennial curated by Nancy Tousley at the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the two-person exhibit See Attached at Truck Gallery with artist Dianne Bos. Sarah has been an artist in residence at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy, and the Association of Visual Artists (SIM) in Reykjavik, Iceland. When she not making art, Sarah is the Photography Facilitator in the Visual Arts department at The Banff Centre where she assists artists in residence and mentors emerging visual artists.

 www.sarahfullerphotography.com

 

paul_webPaul Griffin (July 7, 2013 – August 19,2013)

Paul Griffin is an artist from Sackville, New Brunswick who has previously lived in Ontario and British Colombia. His work also covers a wide range from photography to drawing and presently focuses on installation sculpture. Griffin’s practice investigates the myriad of ways that the vernacular can be used to interpret societal and personal views and perspectives. Over the last decade he has pursued an ongoing body of works titled the Woodpile Series that seek to transform this ubiquitous object into an aesthetic creation.

Griffin graduated from Mount Allison University with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1992 and then went on to complete his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph in 1994. He has lived in Sackville since 1988 where he has worked at Mount Allison University in various positions since 1994. Before concentrating on his academics he worked as a logger, millworker and log home builder in Hazelton, British Columbia from 1977 to 1988.

He has come to Dawson City to work on a piece that explores the aesthetic and social connection between Chinese scholar stones – large boulders that served in formal gardens as contemplative tools – and gold nuggets, both sought after throughout the world as objects of curious beauty and great financial worth. He will endeavour to create a large-scale sculpture out of wood that is embroidered with electroplated roofing nails that will focus on the curious beauty that exists mutually within these two exotic objects.

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2013 participants

ANNOUNCED! 

The Natural & the Manufactured 2013 participants

Sarah Fuller (Banff, AB)
Paul Griffin (Sackville, NB)
Robert Bringhurst (Quadra Island, BC)

Stay tuned for more information throughout 2013.

King essay online

NOW ONLINE:
The Natural & the Manufactured post-exhibition essay 

The ODD Gallery and the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture are proud to present a commissioned text by writer J.P. King to accompany the most recent instalment of The Natural & the Manufactured, an annual thematic residency and exhibition project held in Dawson City,Yukon each summer. Entitled The Same River, King’s essay documents and critically assesses the ideas generated by the work of 2012 event participants B.J. Vogt, Andrew O’Connor, Adriana Kuiper & Ryan Suter, and Sheila Heti.

Essay now available for viewing here: https://naturalmanufactured.com/?p=319