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
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PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
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.
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.
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?