2020 Chu Niikwän Residency

Mar 6

ARTISTS Asad Chishti, Robyn McLeod, & Aimée Dawn Robinson
CURATORS Nicole Bauberger & Lori Beavis

EXHIBITION Meeting by the currents
ON VIEW November 7 – December 2, 2020
LOCATION Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre (1171 Front Street, Whitehorse)

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) with the support of the Government of Yukon, centred around the shared goal of artistic innovation, collaboration and professional development.

For the 3rd Chu Niikwän Artist Residency (August 24th - September 12th, 2020), these organizations opened spaces for three visual artists and a curatorial team to gather and develop an exhibition of new work. The 2020 artists were Asad Chishti, Robyn McLeod, and Aimée Dawn Robinson. The co-curators were Nicole Bauberger and Lori Beavis.

Covid-19 demands a new flexibility of us as we strive to make the dialogues around art that nourish us and our communities. While in previous years each artist would access their own studio spaces in a venue near the Yukon River, this year’s use of studio space was more flexible. One of the three participated from their home studio. The studio visits were replaced with the Zoom curatorial calls and the artists’ open studios evolved into socially-distanced participation in Whitehorse’s Wondercrawl (Sept 5). Making art that seizes the opportunities we can find within physical distancing will continue throughout the exhibition at the KDCC.

The title speaks of our curatorial theme to come together by the river, tethered in a boat, dancing through textile-wrapped trees at the river’s edge; or sending a float plane with a dress to hand off to a curator to install on the shore. It also means coming together across cultures physically or virtually to create a space for dialogue between artists and curators; and between the artists themselves to share what the river could tell them about making and maintaining relationships.

IN THE NEWS
Yukon News, Exhibit showcasing Chu Niikwän Artist Residency works opening at the KDCC
CBC Radio Yukon, New art torn from the headlines
What’s Up Yukon, What’s in a name?
What’s Up Yukon, Culture meets couture
What’s Up Yukon, Seven

Opening reception of meeting by the currents on November 7, 2020. Photos by Erik Pinkerton.

Chu Niikwän Artist Residency Catalogue 2020

2020 Curators-in-Residence

Nicole Bauberger is an artist and curator of settler descent. She is grateful to have made her home on the traditional territories of the Tagish Kwan, where the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council govern since 2003. She stitches her various art practices together with threads of collaborative learning friendships.

Lori Beavis (Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe/ Welsh/Irish) is a curator living and working in Tiohiohtià:ke / Mooniyang/ Montreal, an island in the Kahrhionhwa’kó:wa /the great sized river/ St Lawrence River. Lori’s maternal family comes from Pemadashdakota/ lake of the burning plains / Rice Lake, ON – a body of water she loves and returns to often.

Curatorial Statement

This year, the Chu Niikwan artists in residence found the residency gave them both a new perspective on their social dimensions and furthered their individual artistic vision.

Aimée Dawn Robinson found herself moving out of the customary quiet solitude of her cabin in the woods and visiting, hosting or collaborating with friends, other dancers and musicians during her residency. While in the residency she began to accumulate textiles and design her large-scale fabric costume piece. This work, assembled from fabric donated by the Whitehorse community will be danced at the exhibition’s opening by seven dancers, and then installed as a sculpture in the gallery. For Aimée, her residency at the Old Fire Hall differs from her home in being downtown – this was an urban residency for her, a chance to connect with other people.

Robyn McLeod lives in Ross River, and for health reasons chose to do the residency remotely. Perhaps partly because of this, the social dimensions of the residency were important to her work too, in the process and content of her work. Robyn has been active on the internet talking with friends, colleagues and mentors at the same time as restarting a daily drawing practice through which she creates beading patterns and designs dresses. Robyn has been sewing a series of these dresses for this exhibition. This fibres-based work is subtly informing the connections made between women. The first dress, the “Auntie Dress” (dedicated to her Auntie Virginia) was seen in-progress, as part of September’s Wondercrawl. The residency introduces Robyn’s artwork to a wider audience.

Asad Chishti spent a lot of time doing research at the Energy, Mines and Resources library, looking at the history of the Whitehorse Dam, as well as biking a 4am loop of the city, creating playlists, and sitting tethered in their zodiak on the Yukon river. Their work is more conceptual than physical, focussing on the conundrum of living in a place that takes its name from rapids that aren’t there anymore, rapids that have been tamed out of existence by the dam that powers the city. Asad had many conversations with people along the water about this question, and about how the river itself grew in importance to people sustaining themselves through the loneliness of the COVID19 pandemic lockdown. For Asad, the residency experience was marked as a thoughtful time to ponder the Chu Niikwan and its evolving presence.

Aimée’s dance performance at Wondercrawl, “Seven,” – inspired by seven shots fired at Jacob Blake[1] evoked an uncanny silence among the viewers who stopped along the darkening trail to take some time with it. For Aimee, it was a new step to make a dance that was so explicitly political - Aimée wondered about the time it takes to shoot someone seven times. The silence around her performance was a silence that spoke, and that evoked listening.

[1] On August 23, 2020, Jacob S. Blake, a 29-year-old African American man, was shot and seriously injured by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Sheskey shot at Blake's back seven times when Blake opened the driver's door to his own SUV and leaned in. Three of Blake's sons were in the backseat at the time.

2020 Artists-in-Residence

Asad Chishti

Artist-in-Residence @ Arts Underground

Asad Chishti (they/them) is the @adjacent.furniture librarian, @bul-bul.press printer+publisher, and the @chairstablesorg media inventor. A first-generation Muslim immigrant, they have bicycled across Canada twice. For the past eight years they have been tinkering on research projects local and global around what it means to live a full life.

Themes of interest include but are not limited to: happiness, home, health, hiatus, histories, harvest, habits, _____, and H2O i.e. water. Formally trained as an engineering chemist and photojournalism. They have been taking a photo a day for over ten years, and are currently investigating how to better put ink to paper (in the shape of books).

Their work lives in private homes on bookshelves, has been featured in various print, digital, and real-world spaces.

Whitehorse is named such because of the White Horse rapids (which resembled the manes of a horse). One of the most precarious stretches of the river to cross, less than a decade after the city was incorporated the rapids were submerged under Schwatka Lake.

What does it mean:
To lose the place that names you? To have it transformed into something different.
To have that loss literally power you and your community? Water into electricity.
For this to have been going on since 1958? 62 years.

Does it give a place more or less of a right to call itself by the unnatural transformation of a place? An ode to what was.

Water holds a special place to all life. Hydrogen-bonding, the ability of ice to float on water, gives life time to survive through the winter, below the surface. In 2020, a year to be remembered for many glitches, warps, and bends on how we used to live, lessons on how to keep moving, the importance of what surrounds us where we are has never felt and been more important.

My inquiry focused on the site of the former rapids, where the dam is now. Time was spent both on the river, around the river, pouring over historical aerial images, snapping a few, recording audio and then cooking it all digitally.

Robyn McLeod

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE @ KWANLIN DÜN CULTURAL CENTRE

Robyn McLeod was born in Yellowknife, NT. She is Dene and Scottish decent and is a member of the Deh Gah Gotie First Nations in the Deh Cho Region. Her work is compiled of many different mediums such as fashion design, digital art, traditional dene art, moosehide tanning and mixed media. She has 2 years of training from Blanche Macdonald as well as the Foundation Year with Honours in Visual Art at SOVA. She uses the inspiration that comes from family, culture and environmental sustainability that comes from the resourcefulness of growing up in the Northern Territories.

I am in the process of creating an Indigenous fashion design line exploring contemporary concepts and aspects of Dene culture. It’s fusing my culture’s time-honoured craftsmanship with new and unexpected contemporary materials and media. This line is rooted in Dene historical significance and built locally in the north. It’s a way to reclaim my heritage in a time where Indigenous people continue to remain invisible.

I have been seeing a huge increase of Indigenous women taking the leap into the international fashion stage and now that the pandemic has happened, it has squashed all my plans in sharing my creations on the fashion runways. I have needed to find new ways of showcasing my work. I like the thought of being able to create clothing for my own people to wear that would represent their culture and heritage such as quilling, floral beadwork, delta braid, tufting and hide tanning. I am using environmentally conscious practices that incorporate furs and hides that I have processed myself or bought from local trappers and hide tanners of the north.

My biggest inspirations come from both my grandmothers Celine Villeneuve and Late Florestine McLeod. Both were master seamstresses in their own styles. Celine is now in her 90s and still sews and beads when she is able to. She is also a master delta braid designer. This style originates in the region of the Beaufort Delta, which is the northernmost region in the Northwest Territories where she resides. The delta braid is a rare form of art still practiced today by my family. It is a beautiful form of appliqué and is ribbon of geometric patterns made from layers of multicoloured bias tape and seam bindings. It has been used for generations on parkas and dresses.

As for my Late Grandmother Florestine McLeod (née Lafferty) she was a master Moose hair tufter. Tufting is producing three-dimensional images by stitching and trimming bundles of moose/caribou hair onto tanned hide or birch bark. This type of sewing originated when her grandmother watched a nun make a flower out of yarn and she then went home to use moose hair to make flowers. This makes me extremely proud to have a long line of strong, creative matriarchs in my family.

My vision for this line is to have fashion couture gowns as well as a couture outerwear that is inspired by the north and the people who live in these extreme conditions. I have had to create new pathways in learning to connect with other artists during the pandemic. I have used new technology such as Zoom and using Facebook/Instagram to connect with my artist peers and contractors. I am excited to share my collection with the Chu Niikwän Residency.

mahsi cho

Aimée Dawn Robinson

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE @ THE OLD FIRE HALL

Aimée Dawn Robinson brings wild spaces, the conceptual, and the feminine to embodied performance practices. Aimée is a dancer. She is also a writer, performer, visual artist, researcher, musician, theatre-maker, teacher, producer/curator with 26 years of performance experience. She holds her Master’s in Dance from York University.

Aimée started performing in Toronto in 1994. She has performed, screened, presented and taught dance across Canada and in America, Malaysia, and Japan. Aimée lived in Toronto from 1994 to 2012. Since 2012, she has lived in the Yukon, in and around Whitehorse, Dawson City, the M’Clintock River Valley, and Mount Lorne.

Through her co-productions, Up Darling Contemporary Dance, A MONTH OF SUNDAYS, and Whitehorse Nuit Blanche, Aimée has co-curated/co-produced the premieres of 70 visual art, dance, music and performance works by Canadian and international artists.

Aimée lives in a cabin in the Southern Lakes area of the Yukon, where she delights in and sharpens her art practice. She is grateful to live and work on the lands of the Kwanlin Dün and Taa'an Kwächän Council.

Seven.

-- dedicated to the healing of all who have suffered from police brutality

I was listening to the radio while planning my performance for the Chu Niikwan residency showing in-process. The CBC news came on. In Kenosha, Michigan, 29-year old Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by police officer Rusten Sheskey. Seven times.

The River pulls our stories from us, helps to hear, hold and share stories. I wanted this story, of whatever art I’m making here by this river, to connect with the Outside. To make visible my heart, to connect with the hearts of others – to join in love and rebellion in times of loss and isolation.

The shared garment for seven people, danced at the opening of the Chu Niikwaan residency show, is part of a formal procession of blessing, action, and reflection. The performance creates time to observe all we share -- the light and the shadows, joys and beauty, grief and shock also. Let the power of our steps, and of our gathering, create and send healing into the world from the banks of this powerful water.

I made this 80-foot garment exclusively with fabric donated by the Whitehorse community. The ornaments on the costume are inspired by the regalia of my family's region in the Carpathian basin, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén region. Part of being an artist can be recognizing and understanding what you wish to do with the legacy your Ancestors have given you. No matter how humble, nor how traumatic, our family's stories shape our core, and our core shapes our art practices.