DONNA AKREY | VAGUE TERRAIN

Outdoor Installations
Artist talk and reception: Thursday, August 12, 7pm
Fabrication Collaboration: Friday, August 13 & Saturday August 14, ArtsFest Site
Installation Action: Sunday, August 14, ArtsFest Installation Walk

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PROJECT STATEMENT 

Donna Akrey’s Natural & Manufactured project features a series of overlapping elements, both physical and conceptual, that function at the intersection of public installation, sculpture, intervention, performative gesture, and collaborative action.  While in Dawson City, the artist will first be preparing a large-scale sculptural edition of small hand-held objects that will be placed throughout the city for serendipitous discovery. Fabricated in the appearance of river-worn stones, upon closer inspection these sculptures depict urban topographies and apologetic messages that suggest the role of the natural world on our civilising impulses, and the often destructive environmental and cultural repercussions of human socialization. Akrey’s second component will take place as a collaborative production line set within the context of KIAC’s Yukon Riverside Arts Festival. During the Festival weekend, Akrey will be on-site inviting the public to watch and join her in a process of mass-producing objects of “nature.” A ceremonial public installation of the resulting manufactured objects will conclude Akrey’s project. 

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work reflects an interest in constructed human environments, language and communication, body and mind and the power of the habitual on our dreams and realities. I am interested in the parts that make up our ideas of wholeness. I see my job as somewhat of a wrangler, combining parts and fragments of visual information, physical objects and various idea and belief systems, aware of the futility of the ‘ultimate’ and the contradictions and idiosyncrasies therein.

I am interested in how we build our environments, intentionally or by default. I try to use humour as a way to present problematic issues by drawing the viewer in while also using a playful handmade aesthetic that people seem to relate to. This method of disarming the viewer allows me to touch on serious issues and ask questions. In my practice, I imagine the absurd as real, because sometimes the real is so absurd.

I believe knowledge is relative and fallible rather than absolute and certain and I endeavour to discover the richness in between intention and result. Utilizing common, surplus and discarded materials such as foam, concrete, found objects, junk mail, wood, rubber and household products, I create installations and sculptural objects that function as gigantic understatements, ruminations on the spectacle of the unspectacular.

BIOGRAPHY

DONNA AKREY is a graduate of the Concordia University Bachelor of Visual Arts program, and holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. Her work as been shown extensively throughout Canada in solo exhibitions at Truck Gallery (Calgary), Struts Gallery (Sackville), AKA Gallery (Saskatoon), eyelevel gallery (Halifax), Sansair Gallery (Vancouver) and Third Space (St. John). Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at the Contact Photography Festival (Toronto), Atelier Frankfurt Gallery (Germany), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon) and the Darling Foundary (Montreal), among others. In 2004, Akrey was invited as Artist in Residence at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture in Dawson City. Akrey currently lives in Montreal, where she also teaches at Concordia University.

Links:
mobiusstripmall
Darling Foundry
Mediamatic

The Natural & the Manufactured post-exhibition essay

THE SAME RIVER

by J.P. King

The same river. The glaciers. Water. Waves washing up against the dykes of Dawson City: civilized, but far from civilization. While nearly all of us arrived at this place by road or plane, it was once the Yukon River that would have brought us here. The river was a test. A gateway. Survival. Struggle. A gruelling battle. A way of life. The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in knew the site where the Klondike and Yukon Rivers merged as a fishing camp. The prospectors knew it for a different wealth.

Water, like humans, settles, adapts, and continues to flow. It is resilient and never ceases its constant cycle. In The Natural & the Manufactured exhibit of 2012, a site-specific sculpture offers a humble warning against the disappearance of water, an exhibition of man-made materials likens humanity to the levelling forces of glacial movement, an audio installation enlivens the airwaves with the stories, gossip, and history of Dawson City, and lastly, a conversational lecture contemplates the role of a creative life.

A Silent Siren: Kuiper & Suter’s Whispers of Thaw & Warmth

Kuiper & Suter | “Burned” installed on
2nd avenue, Dawson City

In an empty field, on 2^nd Avenue, stands an unassuming oil barrel painted fire engine red. A thin pipe attached to its side rises to the height of a tall man’s reach, and atop it, like a bird house, is a miniature wooden warning siren. It’s an object in the shape of catastrophic memory, the kind of alarm that once sent children under desks, and mothers to the bunkers. From the boardwalk, this collaborative effort from­ New Brunswick-based artists Adriana Kuiper and Ryan Suter is silent, in stasis, and waiting. I move toward it cautiously, out of a fear that it may begin to scream at any moment, and yet as the distance between the barrel and I closes, I am able to see something gem-like suspended at its centre. It takes only a moment to realize that it is nothing geologic, but quite the opposite: the barrel contains a block of ice cast in the shape of a wooden log, now melting in the hot summer sun.

Like a fire, this silent monument’s material existence is rapidly changing before my eyes, and yet it is the opposite of warming. The transformation is live, visible, and without smoke. The logs are dripping down into a catch basin. As I wait for the roar of a truck behind me to pass, I strain to get closer to the apparatus. As silence returns to the field I am able to hear the humble rhythm of an amplified water drop. Drip. Drip. Drop. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t suggest the type of terror this shape of speaker is famous for. Instead, it sounds as though I am in a damp cave, or huddled beneath a white pine after a light rain.

The use of vernacular materials makes Burned an installation that is easily camouflaged in the setting of Dawson City. The acoustics alert only those who care to investigate the barrel. Wood is a substance entirely inseparable from the natural environment, but a log with cleanly cut ends exhibits civilized intervention. The installation questions the projected crisis of fresh water, the current melting of glaciers, the effects of CO2 emissions, and inefficient use of resources. With barely a whisper, the barrel and its electro-acoustic apparatus asks the empty field: How loud must the disappearance of something be before we begin to listen?

As day turns to night and ice has melted away, all that is left is an extinguished barrel and a mute siren. The gallery assistant will recycle the water of the melted log into a hollow mould and place it in the freezer. Tomorrow the ice fire will be built up again, piled high under the sun, and left in futility to sing its own death song.

Wiped Clean and Left Behind: B.J. Vogt’s Glacial Movements of Civilization

Across the street and inside the ODD Gallery is a more formal set of sculptural works, photographs, and a single channel video by St. Louis artist, B.J. Vogt. This exhibit, titled Ebb & Flow, seeks to investigate a metaphor of humanity as a natural process akin to glacial movement and river flows. Along one wall, twelve photographs of gravel mounds, rock piles, sand heaps, and lumps of dirt are set against bright blue Dawson City skies. This series, titled Kames, makes reference to a unique geological formation, in which deposits of earth build-up on top of glaciers and are laid to rest as the ice retreats. One thinks of mountains in miniature, or rock slides, but really the piles are less majestic and will instead find utility as road gravel, or in-fill. These mounds are records of our activity and gestures of progress. Some of the Kames appear freshly dropped, while others facing neglect have weeds growing up through them. In these portraits, characters begin to emerge from these rather lifeless mounds: the lazy, the busy, the strong, and the sloppy.

BJ Vogt: “Advancing Face-Champion Glacier”, HD Video, 2012.

At the far end of the gallery a screen holds a seemingly still image of a yellow industrial vehicle: a road-grader turning over dirt and gravel. Looking back at the screen moments later I see that it is not a still, but an almost imperceptibly slow video-sequence. The machine crawls across the screen. What was ten seconds of life becomes a 30 minute memorial. The gravel slowly twists in the air and is forced in a wave-like arc, crashing back into the ground. I watch as a sliver in the history of earth’s transformation bends. Dawson City’s gravel roads are turned, folded, and kneaded like bread, smoothed flat and readied for transport. Like the ice age that retreated over 10,000 years ago, the road grader wipes our marks clean, and prepares a fresh surface.

On plinths scattered throughout the gallery are smooth and weightless river rocks constructed from melted plastic shopping bags. The black and beige stones are covered in yellow and grey striations. They have the uncanny appearance of being born of ancient volcanic activity, and committed to a life of tumbling in a river. Deceptively simple, the repurposed material is almost seamless, and one might sooner pass them by, thinking them to be actual river rocks pulled from the shores of the Klondike, rather than the laboured and meticulous masses of man-made material that they are.

In his objects, images, and installations, Vogt melts away the distinctions between natural and artificial,  civilized and natural. From his perspective: Nature is a Machine. It fabricates like we do. Watch the extrusion of a steel pipe with the same eyes as those which see a twig grow from a branch, or listen to a cicada hiss like the static of a mistuned radio. We are reminded that the distance between Industry and Nature is never as far as we think. The use of man-made material mimicking natural form is a constant simple message: the garbage of human progress piles up, unlike nature’s cast-offs and waste, which is always re-used and absorbed back into the cycle. Thus far, our ingenuity arrives as a dead assembly.

BJ Vogt: “Polypropylene 2”, Mixed-media site-specific installation, 2012

The final and most dynamic piece inhabiting the gallery is a waterfall that spits nurdles (the ubiquitous plastic pellets at the centre of all plastic-based industry) over a wooden cliff-face and down into a black basin. The closed-loop plastic waterfall sounds like a heavy rain. Material made fluid and forgiving. One can’t help but think of the environmental messages at play: pollution of fresh water, poisoning of wetlands, and plastic’s overtaking capacity to invade the highest, deepest, and furthest reaches of the earth. Through simple, materially-comparative strategies Vogt makes the base ingredients of industry point at our shameful feelings towards civilization, and our fantasy of an untouched and perfect model of nature.

Who To Do The Telling: Andrew O’Connor’s Pirate Radio Utopia

As the late summer sun dips behind the hill, shadowing Dawson City, I am walking down 3^rd Avenue with an awkwardly large stereo-system on my shoulder and following a small hand-drawn map. Emerging through the static are the voices of local Dawsonites recounting stories of past and present, gossip, myth, and lore. As I cross Queen Street the static evaporates and a clear single voice begins to speak: “We longed for an era where you wanted something and you went out and got it.”

Andrew O’Connor: “Frequencies: Dawson City, Interactive audio installation, 2012. (Installation map by Rian Lougheed-Smith)

Filled with nostalgia and reflection, this narrative is only one of many that constitute Frequencies: Dawson City, an interactive sound installation of Toronto-based Andrew O’Connor. During his summer residency at KIAC, O’Connor collected over 25 hours of storytelling from locals and collaged them into thematic chapters, which amount to an alternative, personalized, and private aural history of Dawson City. This documentary, whose only access point is a personal radio tuned to various low-watt FM transmitters placed in 11 locations across town, will never provide the same narrative sequence twice. For me, the project recalls the words of Heraclitus, who said “It is impossible to step into the same river twice.” Each chapter is a different duration, and there is no firmness to the order of your route. As one passes between transmitters, waves of radio noise wash over the voices, which join together and then separate again.  Behind me, the sound of an engine turning over mixes with a laughing baby, boots on the boardwalk, and the clicking of a raven’s feet hopping on gravel. The stories being told are the ones I always wanted hear, but never knew who to ask to do the telling. Loops of memory pass through buildings, bodies, and drift out into space. I allow the voices to wash over me, drown me in history, and I emerge bathed in the narratives that make this place what it is.

The stories address local concerns, like the history of Bombay Peggy’s, the RCMP, looking for love in the North, mining, the Flood of ’79, aboriginal issues, and Dawson as a place of escape and acceptance. Listeners may recognize the voices of some of Dawson’s brightest characters, like Eldo Enns who describes a final frontier and “a place of forgiveness where people can put their pasts behind them.”

Playing on the traditions of pirate and guerrilla radio, and taking inspiration from Tetsuo Kegowa’s vision of a polymorphous radio utopia, O’Connor scrawls an auditory graffiti into airwaves of Dawson. This work is an invitation to a game of hide and seek, and while all eleven chapters play at once, at all times of the day, you’ll only ever be able to step from one to the next, catching brief moments between stations, where old voices come together to tell entirely new stories.

Selecting One Stone: Sheila Heti’s Soul of Time

Sheila Heti

Above the ODD Gallery, on a warm evening in late August, a crowd piles into the Odd Fellows Hall to hear Sheila Heti speak about “The Soul of Time”. What proceeds is less of a lecture and far more a conversation and divination session in which Heti, assisted by a handful of pennies and a tome of ancient Chinese philosophy, invites the audience to ruminate upon a series of curious questions exploring the role of the artist within a natural and manufactured world.

Heti begins by describing a dream where she comes to understand a new form of narrative, in which the actors of a drama interact with the audience. “The complete world that is created in the artwork is broken, and the artwork is shown to be a construction. And then this channel is made between the life of the audience and the work itself.” We begin to see that we are the material with which she will work over the next hour. We are introduced to the I Ching (The Book of Changes). We are told that there are 64 States of Being, Phases, or Directions, and that while they are all simultaneously active at once we are only capable of understanding one at a time. We are invited collectively, in our heads, to ask this question: Where am I…What state are we in? Then the coins are thrown. Tails. Heads. Tails. Heads. Heads. Tails. #47 Oppression/Exhaustion. The image of: Lake over water.

Sheila Heti says that she doesn’t really believe in divination, but wonders how it is possible that throwing coins at random might accurately describe a state of being. “It is a way of simplifying the chaos,” she explains. These methods are used as artificial constraints in isolating a single state of understanding. Simply said, “you can’t move in 64 directions. You can only move in one.” These kinds of games bridge the natural and manufactured worlds, isolating something from everything so that we may understand it.

The tables turn. Yes/No answers have been prepared randomly in the form of a slide projection, and the audience is invited to ask the questions. Through this we discover that the soul is dependent on the natural world. It is a manifestation of time. We must have experiences for time to eat. Time won’t grow fat. From the soul we find our nourishment. Time does forget.

Healers, shamans, storytellers and artists have long been the keepers of wisdom. It is in their active distillation of chaos, their fabrication of a singularity within the endless natural world, that we may glimpse the nucleus of our own existence: the soul. Like selecting one shiny stone from the river bottom teaches us what kilometres of water covers over, it is an artist’s goal and duty to re-structure a complex world, which we think we understand, and give it back to us in a single state. It is this gift which becomes the heart of emotion, and the soul of time.

The River Brought Us Here: N&M, Dawson City, 2012

 These events, installations, and exhibits tucked up in the top corner of Canada show a multidisciplinary understanding of civilization’s role in an ever-changing natural world. The metaphor of water, rivers, glaciers, and ice all capture the essence of Dawson City’s geography, climate, and peculiar history. In each of their works the artist, or pair of artists has offered the community their own understanding of the world using the materials and mediums that best explain their visions.

Toronto, November 2012

_______________________________

BIOGRAPHY

JP KING is an artist, writer, critic, publisher & printer living in Toronto. He runs Paper Pusher Printworks, a Risograph printing operation with a literary and arts publishing arm. He currently writes for Kolaj, an international collage magazine run out of Montreal, and his book of narrative poems and illustrations, We Will Be Fish, was first published by PistolPress in 2008. As an artist-in-residence at KIAC in the fall of 2011, King took inspiration from the Gold Rush era to work on his anachronistic book project Manhole, which explores a future vision of Canada sustaining itself on an excavated landfill. His personal work explores contemporary mythology, masculinity, garbage, and collective activity. His obsession with paper manifests itself in collage, installation, murals, and multiples,

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ADRIANA KUIPER & RYAN SUTER  |  BURNED

Outdoor Site-specific Installation
Arts Festival Installation Walk: Sunday, August 19, 2pm

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Since moving to Sackville, a small town in rural New Brunswick, artists Adriana Kuiper and Ryan Suter have become increasingly conscious of the surrounding rural environment.  As makers of things they are specifically interested in the ways their neighbours ingeniously craft makeshift buildings, adapt agricultural equipment and generally engineer and repurpose everyday materials to construct useful and curious objects. The artists frequently draw upon these vernacular constructions for source material that is not far from what both artists have explored in their own individual practices; Kuiper often repurposes instructions for safety shelters meant as protection from impending disaster – natural and otherwise, and Suter attempts to disrupt our expectations of the natural landscape using sound and images.

An interest in the folly of false perceptions relating to protection from seemingly disastrous events led to new collaborative work. Perhaps ironically, and as fate would have it, the couple lost their shared studio to a large fire that occurred this past winter in a historical building in Sackville.  It was a combination of this unfortunate event and doing research about Dawson’s early days that the piece Burned was conceived.  In reading about the city’s history, two bits of information struck the artists. Firstly, it has been noted that prospectors would keep continuous bonfires burning to thaw frozen ground in the winter months. These small fires allowed them to gain access to muck underneath that could be arduously hauled up and later sifted through for gold. And secondly; bucket brigades were relied upon for fire fighting, and early attempts to defeat destructive fires in Dawson were often thwarted by freezing temperatures. The inevitable futility of these particular endeavors both interested the artists and felt familiar to previous ideas explored in art works completed by them in the past.

This strange paradox of freezing and burning simultaneously also became a key factor in the inception of the work for the Natural & the Manufactured exhibition. The sculpture references barrels seen in the local landscape that are used to burn waste or wood that is sometimes used to provide a source of heat and warmth. However, instead of setting material ablaze, frozen firewood is loaded into the barrel. The makeshift firewood slowly melts into a bucket in the base of the sculpture and the water collected from the melting ice is regularly recast/frozen into more icy wood to fuel the failed fire. The work also alerts viewers when the “fire” needs to be restarted as a somewhat pathetic alarm of drips amplified through a speaker stops when the firewood runs out. This perpetual activity of attempting to start or extinguishing an ineffective fire becomes arduously cyclical and therefore the sculpture itself becomes reliant on efforts that are perhaps made in vain.

BIOGRAPHIES

Adriana Kuiper is an installation artist who lives and works in Sackville, New Brunswick. Her recent work explores versions of modified, hidden architectural structures meant to suggest safety from extreme forces, natural and otherwise.  Her work investigates provisionally built structures found in the local landscape, and she often adapts and manipulates existing instructions for “Do-It-Yourself” shelters and small buildings.  Outdoor public installations of her work have been show recently at Nuit Blanche in Toronto, and at Dalhousie University in Halifax.  Kuiper’s work has been shown across Canada in cities such as Kitchener, Oakville, Vancouver and Calgary, and has been exhibited internationally in Oslo, Norway.  Adriana Kuiper is a faculty member at Mount Allison University where she teaches sculpture and drawing.

Ryan Suter is a multi media artist currently living in deep Middle Sackville.  His media work explores the spaces between things seen and things heard through the lens of film, music and installation.  Ryan teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His work has exhibited throughout Canada.

SHEILA HETI  |  THE SOUL OF TIME

The Natural & Manufactured Lecture: Friday, August 17th at 7pm

“I have always thought a lot about the word ‘soul’ and have often wondered how it relates to anything real. One day, waiting for a subway with a friend, I thought that maybe Time was the real thing — the “body” — and we were ITS soul, rather than the common idea of people having bodies, and HAVING a soul. In the years since that thought came to me, I have tried in various ways to pin it down. Sometimes the notion that “we are the soul of time” seems so clear to me, as plain as that tree standing over there. Sometimes I have no idea what “we are the soul of time” could possibly mean; it looks bizarre. In this lecture, I’ll try to understand and explain and make sense of this idea, hopefully with the help of the audience.” – Sheila Heti

B. J. VOGT  |  EBB & FLOW

Gallery Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 16, 7pm, KIAC Ballroom
Reception to follow in the ODD Gallery

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ARTIST STATEMENT

Our influence over the natural world, and the impact this influence in turn exerts upon human civilization, makes readily apparent that we are, in fact, part of an ongoing natural process in which both choice and chance determine the outcome. It is relevant therefore to propose that humans exist as a natural event unfolding within the evolutionary timeline of the Earth.

Through the creation of photographic images, sculpture, and video based works that manipulate manufactured environments in order to mimic naturally occurring landforms and events, I call into question the definition of the terms ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’. While concepts of permanence and perfection have long been the bench mark for defining the division of these two supposedly different types of entities, it is within their ever changing and imperfect evolutions that I find the substance for drawing conceptual parallels between them.

The focus of the work in Ebb and Flow is to investigate some of the various fluid states of human culture and its by-products in comparison to naturally occurring objects, systems, and events; especially the mechanisms of rivers, glaciers, and igneous rock formation. It is hard to conceive of within the daily human timeframe the scope of impact that we as a collective organism have affected upon the landscape. However when the duration of certain events and processes are sped up, slowed down, or frozen in time; our impressions become more evident. Through their collective forms the works created for this exhibition consolidate or expand the minutia of everyday life into gently manipulated representations of dynamic natural processes and systems.

BIOGRAPHY

B.J. Vogt lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, USA where he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture in 2006 from Washington University. Vogt has been the recipient of a Critical Mass for the Arts Creative Stimulus grant, a Santo Foundation  Individual Artist award and, in conjunction with a residency at the Cite’ Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, the 2006 Bill Kohn Travel Scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis. His work is currently featured in the Urbanity exhibition at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the 2011 Creative Stimulus Award exhibition: Anomalous Perspectives at the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri.

ANDREW O’CONNOR  |  FREQUENCIES: DAWSON CITY

Outdoor Site-specific Sound Installation
(tune your radio to 107.9FM between Princess & King / 2nd & 3rd)
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 16, 7pm in the KIAC Ballroom
Arts Festival Installation Walk: Sunday, August 19, 2pm

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ARTIST STATEMENT

I came to Dawson with a structure for this project in mind, and a vision for how I was going to present it, but I wanted the subject matter and the content of this piece to be dictated entirely by the people who live here, and the way this place sounds.  Over the course of my residency I`ve been collecting interviews with people who live here, and recording the changing soundscapes as the city swells up with life, and quiets back down.  So what you`ll hear with Frequencies; Dawson City, is entirely rooted in this place, and comes from the sounds, and stories I’ve encountered while here.

One thing about radio waves that’s always fascinated me is that they go on forever, they just keep drifting further and further out into space, they get weaker and change over time as other things start to interfere, but they’re still there.  Radio waves are much like memories in that regard, they start in a specific place, at a specific time, but resonate outwards, forever changing over time.  I wanted to explore that similarity, in a way that embraces the many narratives one finds in Dawson City.  To present these many narratives I wanted to work with chance, and random juxtaposition.

Frequencies; Dawson City is a public installation that comes to you through the magic of radio waves.  It’s made for a series of low watt FM transmitters placed around Dawson City.  Each transmitter is tuned to the same frequency (107.9FM) and laid out in an array where as you move through the installation, different transmitters will fade in and out of range.  The transmitters are each broadcasting a different loop of soundscapes, stories and, reflections about the physical space where they are located.  Each loop is of a different length, so as you walk through the installation with your radio tuned you will encounter an ever changing collage of stories, and juxtaposition of opinions.  The idea is to create a narrative documentary, but one that’s never the same twice.  What each person ends up hearing depends on where you access the piece, the speed you move through it, and the direction you point your antenna, leaving the listener to draw their own meaning from the contrasting ideas they encounter.

This is not a walking tour with a start and a finish, the map is there to indicate the general area you can tune in the piece, there will be certain spots where signals will overlap, and possibly spots where you’ll just get static.  Move through the installation however you wish, what you end up hearing all depends on you and your radio.

BIOGRAPHY

ANDREW O’CONNOR is a transmission artist based out of Toronto.  Active in community radio for over 15 years now at stations like CKMS FM in Waterloo, CKLN in Toronto and Shouting Fire Radio in San Francisco, his work has also been heard on programs across the CBC network including Inside the Music, The Signal, Two New Hours and The Current among others. Andrew O’connor’s radio work has also been featured internationally on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, WGXC in New York State, and Radio Zero in Lisbon.  His sound installations, often radio based, have been presented at The Vancouver New Music Festival, The Third Coast Filmless Festival in Chicago, Megapolis in Baltimore, OK Quoi in Sackville, and the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound in Kitchener.

The 2011 Natural & Manufactured post-exhibition essay

BELONGING IN DAWSON

by Megan Graham

Every year, the ODD Gallery invites artists to participate in The Natural & The Manufactured project, a six week-long residency in Dawson City, Yukon. During this residency, artists explore significant issues such as landscape, consumer culture, and meaning in order to “stimulate and engage people in a re-examination of the various cultural and economic values imposed on the environment, while exploring alternative political, social, economic and aesthetic agendas and strategies towards a re-interpretation of the regional landscape and social infrastructure.” ¹ In addition to the assigned theme and approach, the artists must present their work in the ODD Gallery or in a public art installation at the end of the residency.

The Natural & The Manufactured residency challenges the artists to create new site-specific works based on their stay in Dawson, which requires a certain amount of effort in engaging with the community rather than using the residency to work on ongoing projects. Ideally, all artists who participate in the year-round KIAC Artist in Residence program get involved with the town, but they are usually able to do so without the pressure of immediately displaying recently created work that reflects their engagement and understanding of the community. The format of the residency raises several questions: is meaningful engagement and understanding achievable in the course of six weeks? How can artists successfully complete this assignment?

For their time in Dawson, the artists buy expensive groceries, walk on the dyke, drink Pilsner at the Pit until last call, exceed bandwidth limits—essentially, they live the Dawson lifestyle, and they fit in easily due to the diversity of the population. For the purposes of this residency in particular, art historian Lucy Lippard’s notion of “sense of place” might serve as an answer to the question of belonging or engagement during the residency. In her work The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, she defines sense of place as “a way for nonbelongers to belong, momentarily.” ² The goal for the artists becomes a way of belonging that is momentarily meaningful, a way that goes beyond drinking a shot containing a shriveled toe.

For the 2011 residency, Bill Burns (Toronto), Deborah Stratman (Chicago), and Steve Badgett (Chicago) utilized distinct strategies to meet the thematic requirements of the project, as well as exhibiting a nuanced sense of place that explored the psychic geography of Dawson in surprising ways. Rather than falling into the pitfalls of the “Artist as Ethnographer” ³ or by attempting some “authentic” representation of the town by regurgitating a clichéd visual identity, the artists incorporated facets of their Toronto and Chicago practices and selves into their work inspired by Dawson, resulting in a higher collaboration and engagement that genuinely belonged.

Stratman and Badgett’s public art installation Augural Pair consisted of two six-foot tall pine viewing stations. The first scope was installed on Second Avenue between Queen and Princess Streets. There was no explanatory plaque or sign, and the only decoration on the smooth blond wood was an electron shell diagram for gold, element 79 in the Periodic Table of Elements. The scope looked to a second-level window at the CIBC Bank, where a red digital display listed the current price of gold as provided by a live internet feed. Through the viewfinder, the commodity of gold is reified as we see the arcane value of the precious metal discretely quantified. Though the concept of gold’s value has been made real through its quantification, it becomes clear that we still cannot reach this gold which we desire; the scope emphasizes our distance.

Similarly, the second scope in Augural Pair (also six-foot tall, but lacking any inscription) was placed on the bank of the Yukon River, looking up and across to a mirrored disk installed on land belonging to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. The reflective disk was surrounded by realistic life-sized sculptures of ravens that responded to the mirror and invited interactions with live ravens. Again, through the use of the viewfinder and the division of the river, the viewer’s distance from the object is emphasized. Likewise, desire was heightened as anything in peripheral vision turned to black through the viewfinder. Depending on the weather, the form of desire changed. On a pleasant day with no clouds, the mirror reflected the blue sky in a bright, obvious way, creating the desire for something to extract. On a gray, overcast day, the disk resembled a hole in the landscape, exposing a desire for something that had already been extracted, or the need to be whole.

Viewers familiar with Dawson and the Yukon could identify the site-specific elements of Augural Pair. For example, the subject of gold was a timely inclusion in the project. In the summer of 2011, the historic Gold Rush town was buzzing with the idea of a second gold rush. GroundTruth Exploration, a local mineral exploration company, boasted an increased summer staff of over 70 soil samplers or “dirtbaggers,” ostensibly correlating with the appearance of new expediting and helicopter companies. ⁴ The Discovery Channel’s Gold Rush: Alaska filmed its second season of the mining reality TV show in the area. Even The New York Times had an extensive article about the Yukon’s mushroom forager-turned-millionaire Shawn Ryan of Ryanwood Exploration. ⁵

Likewise, the incorporation of ravens into Stratman and Badgett’s project was a logical choice. The Common Raven is ubiquitous in the Yukon Territory, and is thus frequently employed in representations of Dawson. The highly intelligent birds hold a sacred place in regional mythology as beloved tricksters and world creators. Specifically, Augural Pair draws on a traditional story of how the raven stole the sun and released it into the sky. ⁶ Stratman and Badgett’s carved birds fit seamlessly into this story, as they held court as cautious guardians of the covetous shiny orb. Furthermore, the title of the project, Augural Pair,references the ancient Roman augur, a religious official who observed and interpreted natural signs, especially the behavior of birds, to determine divine approval or disapproval of a proposed action.”augur”. ⁷ There could be no better choice for such a bird in Dawson than the raven.

Although the content of Augural Pair clearly employed Dawson iconography, the framework or narrative structure of the story that Stratman and Badgett extracted from their residency had all the distinct markings of their artistic practice. Stratman is primarily a filmmaker concerned with “how history plays out in the land.” A common theme in her films and public interventions is surveillance, whether being watched by someone or something else, as in the 2002 film In Order Not To Be Here, or a self-surveillance of emotions, as evidenced by Fear, an ongoing project in which participants call a toll-free number and describe their deepest fears. With the collective SIMPARCH, Badgett has created community-minded installations which fuse politics, humour, and utility. The collective aestheticizes sustainability in projects such as Hyrdomancy (2006), where the means of clean water acquisition is made visible. Works like Free Basin (2000), where wooden basins built for skateboarding were installed in five art gallery spaces, reflect the collective’s concern with understanding and playfully altering the purposes of a specific site. ⁸

Stratman and Badgett demonstrate the typical format of a residency, where artists arrive with pre-existing concerns in their practices and then find inspiration in a new, specific space. In a mutually beneficial exchange, viewers re-interpret and expand their conception of the site, and artists explore new dimensions and possibilities for their practices. This is not quite what happened with Bill Burns’ residency.

When I first heard about Burns’ intentions for his ODD Gallery show, I thought it was bound for failure—and not a sexy failure. ⁹ For more on failure in contemporary art practices, see Nicole Antebi, Colin Dickey, and Robby Herbst, eds., Failure!: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices (Los Angeles, California: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007). I remember having a conversation with ODD Gallery Director Lance Blomgren several weeks before the opening of the show, where I asked, with disbelief and moderate concern, “So he’s just going to carve the names of esoteric art world figures into logs? That’s his plan?” As if that would resonate with Dawson residents, or Mean Something.

My initial response at the opening of The Veblen Good wasn’t much more nuanced. The chalkboard wall work listing “those who have helped me, those I still hope will help me, and those who wronged me” gave context and imbued humour into the massive logs with the same names inscribed into them. The Photoshopped facelifts to the S.S. Keno (now the H.U. Obrist) and a Holland America tourbus (rebranded as Martin Kippenberger Tours) provided easy laughs, as did the witty autobiographical watercolours of Burns’ outdoor expeditions with curators, collectors, and editors. This was all fine and good, but I couldn’t help feeling cheated by Burns’ show. Did he even consider the place he had been living in for the past month?

I mistakenly believed that a work that didn’t obviously reflect an engagement with Dawson couldn’t speak about Dawson on a meaningful level. This was a problem of framework. Where Stratman and Badgett used their own artistic framework to convey Dawson-specific content, it is helpful to view the autobiographical content of Burns’ work in a Dawson framework for its meaning and sense of place to be revealed. Burns’ inscription of himself into the world of Dawson is explicit (writing the names of people who have shaped his life on a blackboard, on logs, on a boat, on a bus), but the relationship of life in Dawson to Burns’ work is less deliberate.

The Veblen Good is not devoid of Dawson content. The lumber used for the engraved logs was sourced from West Dawson. Burns photographed the S.S. Keno, Holland America tourbus, and the “Building With No Name” during his residency. The name Martin Kippenberger holds significance to Dawson residents who recall the German artist’s METRO-Net project, in which he installed entrances to underground transit stations in cities worldwide, including Dawson in 1995. ¹⁰ The wildlife and outdoor travels depicted in the watercolour works would resonate with most northerners’ adventurous spirits.

But what really matters to Dawson is how Burns illustrated the social dynamics of a small town in the North in ingenious, subtle simplicity. In a town that so rigidly attempts to exhibit a coherent identity based on a four-year period in history, it becomes necessary to map new stories and heroes and values onto daily life in order to make present-day Dawson a place worth living. It requires carving a place for yourself and injecting your own brand of incoherence. It means coming to terms with the private (and public) lists of those who have helped us and those who have wronged us, because these are the people who help define us. One of the beautiful facets of Dawson is that it eludes a homogenous definition. In many ways it is a chosen community: many of its residents were not born and raised there, and its extreme remoteness requires an intentional arrival. The people who make up Dawson comprise a multitude of experiences and opinions. It’s a small town that’s anything but small-minded.

Stratman and Badgett’s project also taps into powerful emotional territory in its exploration of desire and loss. By presenting these emotional forces in context with a shared history of gold, extraction, and traditional mythology, desire and loss become very specific to Dawson. Augural Pair poses charged sociological questions: How do you put a price on your community? Can the acquisition of our desire fill the place of things we have lost?

Just as The Veblen Good doesn’t promote a particular path or tell Dawson residents how to live, Augural Pair doesn’t provide answers or make suggestions for viewers. These are good things. There are countless examples of collaborations between artists and communities where projects end up being prescriptive, as if the momentarily belonging artist understands the needs of a community better than those who are a part of it. ¹¹ The projects created in 2011’s The Natural & The Manufactured residency were successful because they uncovered more questions than answers in their exploration of Dawson.

In a diverse place like Dawson, there needs to be a variety of residents, residencies, projects, and frameworks for understanding. This results in a multitude of ways for artists and viewers to engage with Dawson and each other. Stratman, Badgett, and Burns actively challenged ideas of how we belong in a place and how a place belongs to us.

STEVE BADGETT & DEBORAH STRATMAN | AUGURAL PAIR

Outdoor Site-specific Installation, N&M 2011
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 11, 7pm, KIAC Ballroom
Arts Festival Installation Walk: Sunday – August 14, 1 PM

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Badgett and Stratman’s public sculptural interventions take the form of two viewing stations—complete with magnifying spotting scopes—that allow the audience to focus in on two discrete constructions. Above the CIBC Bank on Second Ave., electronic signage displays up-to-the-minute pricing of gold. On a forested ridge across the Yukon River, a large mirrored disc reflects the luminosity of the sky as a phenomenological mystery, attracting ravens to nearby rocks and branches. Investigating how value and desire are connected to landscape and resource extraction, these two works suggest a connection between international commodities exchange and natural splendour. The banal digital depiction of speculative economics coupled with the magical reflection of the luminous sky reveal a set of cultural beliefs that conflate “the numbers” with the vicissitudes of nature. Witnessed through the mediated viewpoint of the lens, these works literally bring into focus the things we might desire but can’t ultimately reach.

BIOGRAPHY

Working collaboratively and individually, Steve Badgett & Deborah Stratman have shown their work internationally at some of the globe’s premier institutions and events including the Whitney Museum (New York), the Tate Modern (London), the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Sundance Film Festival, Documenta (Kassel), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), and the Centre for Land Use Interpretation (Wendover, Utah). Steve is best known for his work with the artist group SIMPARCH, while Deborah typically works in video, film, sound and installation. More info: simparch.org / pythagorasfilm.com