2018 Chu Niikwän Residency
Yukon artists Nicole Bauberger, Blake Lepine and Lia Fabre-Dimsdale, along with emerging curators Rebecca Manias and Katie Newman, have been selected as the first participants of the Chu Niikwän Artist Residency (CNAR) program.
Centred around the shared goal of artistic innovation, collaboration and professional development, this three-week paid residency will invite the three artists and two curators to develop an exhibition of new work, which will be presented at Arts Underground in September 2018.
Named by the Kwanlin Dün First Nation Elders’ Council to recognize the Yukon River, the Chu Niikwän Artist Residency is jointly presented by the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre, the Yukon Arts Centre, and the Yukon Art Society. Each of the partner organizations is providing a studio space located close to the Yukon River in downtown Whitehorse, with the goal of facilitating collaboration between the artists and gaining possible inspiration from the river itself.
Rebecca Manias and Katie Newman
Curators in Residence
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Named by the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre’s Governance Council to recognize the Yukon River, the Chu Niikwän Artist Residency is a unique partnership between three visual arts presenters: Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre (KDCC), the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC) and the Yukon Art Society (YAS). The artists and curators in residence have worked near and around the Yukon River to create the body of work presented in this exhibition titled, To Be By the River.
The movement and direction of a river is a response to the landscape in which it exists. The strength of the river moves through and with the surrounding environment to carve out its own path. The residency is situated along the Yukon River, which has a tremendous historical, political and iconic presence. The artists have reflected on narratives surrounding the idea of “river” and what that means in Whitehorse, Yukon and beyond. Similar to the way in which a river carves its path, the artists are also giving shape to the stories that go against the prevailing narratives of our time.
Lia Fabre-Dimsdale, Blake Lepine, and Nicole Bauberger each explore themes of identity, culture, and reclamation.
Nicole Bauberger
Artist in Residence
ARTIST STATEMENT
On my first walk out to the river to collect experiences and materials to make things with, I was still feeling pretty shy. But I had two interactions.
One gentleman asked me if he could buy a cigarette from me, but I didn’t have any. I bought some, but no one asked me after that. Still, him asking me made me see how many cigarette butts were left on the ground along the river.
I’m not a smoker myself, but I kind of love smoking, having a small campfire in your hand. I just never seem to get around to it. It seemed to me that lots of people have a smoke by the river.
I gathered the cigarette butts and made the two pieces with them inspired by a conversation with Katie Newman, one of the curators, about how with chain-smoking you light one cigarette from another. There is beauty in the idea of the fire passing along this way. Picking up old cigarette butts, the beauty in that is veiled by disgust, and even a crossing of taboos. I washed my hands well afterwards.
I guess there are plastics in those filters, they never break down. Seems like an interestingly complex thing to think about, the way we put them into the world. David Neufeld remarked that when he looked at the pieces, at first, they seemed to be made of natural materials. And cigarette butts, white or tan, have the colours of birch bark, if you think about it.
There is another man named Dennis who will talk to you in a flowingly poetic way, speaking of Grandmother, and spelling out words on his fingers, on his two hands. I may be mistaken, but I think the odds of getting to hear Dennis’ words increase if you are a woman. The first day, he spoke to me about many things, including the colours in the Medicine Wheel, which he spelt out on his fingers like the words. Red, yellow, white and black.
These colours are also the primary colours of the Ancient Greeks, as far as I know. They didn’t have a word for blue. That’s why Homer was always saying “the wine-dark sea.” Blue was just a kind of black.
Looking at the limited palette available to me in found glass, it got me thinking about framing the world with those four colours as my primary. What is yellow? That pale olive coloured glass. Beer bottle glass is the closest to red.
I made four-bead pendants thinking about these colours inspired by Dennis. I drilled and formed the beads, with my fingers in the water. Damp and grit accompanied their making closely.
One of the things you notice, looking at the broken glass, is that it’s mostly green and brown. Rust and oxidized copper are also green and brown. So is a school kid’s idea of a tree. A line of bushes runs along most edges of the river.
In the past I have noticed that if I am making art near the river, many people will come up to me to tell me what they think I should know about the river. I had hoped to use my artwork as a vehicle to float their stories to you. In the end, rain, shyness, and a desire to immerse myself in the solitude of exploring a new way of working with found materials, kept me from fully living up to this plan. I hope to do more with it in the future. In the meantime, I am very grateful for all I have been given, including the materials the river itself contributed to the work in this show, and to my partner Dean Eyre, who carried a handful of candle ice up out of the river this spring. I also owe thanks to Jeanine Baker, who set me up with tools for glass, and Luann Baker and the artists of Lumel Studio.
The Old Firehall // Yukon Arts Centre
Blake Nelson Shaá'koon Lepine
Artist in Residence
ARTIST STATEMENT
Blake Lepine’s superimposition of formline designs over western-style illustrations questions what is “authentic” representation. People wonder what formline art represents, while for others the imagery is obvious. Drawing connection between photographic representation and formline.
The Culture Cabins // Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre
Lia Fabre-Dimsdale
Artist in Residence
ARTIST STATEMENT
These four comic book cover pieces are inspired by classic French comic books from the mid-20th century, and reimagining the typical European or Caucasian male main characters as First Nations women of Canada.
The idea behind this concept was to merge together and identify elements of my own upbringing, being raised by parents from two different cultural and ancestral backgrounds: my mother’s French-Italian side and my father’s First Nations side. The second meaning behind the concept was to explore the act of normalizing cultural and ethnic diversity in classic and long-existing elements of pop culture and forms of entertainment, and what it means to me and people like myself.
The comic book cover pieces mainly reference the book cover style of the French comic book Les Aventures de Tintin by Hergé, a series that I enjoyed reading during my childhood, and graphic design elements from Boule et Bill by Jean Roba, and Yoko Tsuno by Roger Leloup.
An element of the final comic book cover piece designs that I believed was important was to channel the idea of normalizing diversity with the comic book characters, and to not have the need to formally state or explain in the stories themselves that the characters are anything but a straight, European or Caucasian, cis-gendered male.
Marie and Team!
Marie is the main character of this story concept, and the only First Nations woman on her science research team in the story trope, and grew up in a small rural community before moving into the big city and studying ecology and bio-engineering. The science-fiction theme for this story concept was inspired by the “Yoko Tsuno” comic series.
Hazel & Amanda
The two main characters, Hazel, a private investigator, and Amanda, Hazel’s intern/apprentice, are both First Nations women. Amanda’s background, however, was an idea that I felt was very important, with her being a person of mixed ethnicity and identifying as First Nations, not only because that’s what part of her heritage was, but because the teachings she grew up learning and respecting were of her traditional First Nations culture; therefore, despite her appearance also not being what some people may distinguish as what a “typical” First Nations person may look like, she identifies as what she feels is right for herself all the same.
Yukon Art Society // Arts Underground Studio