Chu Niikwän Artist Residency | Elemental Transformations
ELEMENTAL TRANSFOMRATIONS
Focus & Edge Galleries, November 3 - 27, 2021
We kindly acknowledge this exhibition and residency are held on the Traditional Territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council.
The 2021 Chu Niikwän Artists Residency exhibition, Elemental Transformations, draws its name from the materials and concepts used by the participating artists – Rebecca Manias, Kim Roberts and Sheelah Tolton. Their practices represent a diverse range of interests. Both in the themes they explore and the media they use, each artist transforms the elements into their own distinct vision.
A highlight of the 2021 residency was the artists’ participation in Wondercrawl, an outdoor event hosted by Something Shows on September 10. While the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting our ability to present the visual arts, Wondercrawl was an opportunity for artists to meaningfully connect with festival-goers.
For Kim Roberts, there is magic in glass and the way it captures the light. As a stained-glass and mosaic artist, Roberts makes luminous tableaus of the world she sees around her – wildlife, landscapes, and small northern towns. She is sometimes inspired by the beadwork design of her Métis heritage. She uses inlays to create silhouettes of animals and people that animate the glass backgrounds. Other times her interest is in the inherent beauty of the elements, such as agate, and the results are more abstract pieces. As the residency’s Indigenous artist, Roberts worked in a Culture Cabin at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre. At Wondercrawl, Roberts hung her pieces above the cultural centre’s fire-pit where the glassworks were illuminated among the trees on the river’s edge. Even the small pieces – feathers of all colours dangling from a post – transformed the space into something magical.
As the emerging artist for the residency, Sheelah Tolton was based in Arts Underground. Tolton works with clay to make earthen birdhouses based on human home designs. A brick birdhouse is made out of hundreds of tiny bricks that Tolton fashioned from the clay. A small condo and a home with corrugated siding reflect modern trends in housing. A lunar house predicts the housing of the future. The miniature dwellings are remarkably life-like replicas of the places people live in. This is the irony of Tolton’s work – the idea that we make houses for birds in response to our own fantasies of the perfect home. As appealing as the birdhouses are aesthetically, conceptually they speak to issues of affordable housing and the seemingly impossible dream of having a home to call one’s own. Even the birds don’t come out as winners, as their natural habitat is sacrificed for these artificial dwellings whose designs goes unappreciated by the avian inhabitants.
Rebecca Manias worked from the Old Fire Hall, where the Yukon River fed into their explorations of identity and the fluidity of gender. Their original intention was to create a number of realistic paintings subverting traditional notions of masculinity. However, Manias instead moved towards creating three free-standing, abstract self-portraits rendered in wool and polyurethane foam and acrylic paint, which were installed for Wondercrawl. They also made a series of similarly-styled portraits, which are wall-hangings. The portraits are titled with what we associate as women’s or men’s names – Chelsea, Katie, Liz – but the pieces themselves defy any specific gender. Manias provides sketches to show their process in developing each individual’s portrait. The finished portraits refuse to allow the subjects to be judged according to social norms or standards of beauty. Manias’ portraits suggest that our usual ways of assessing people fails to understand their complex inner natures and gender identities, which are far more fluid and dynamic than outward appearances can convey.
Tsin’įį choh/Thank you to our preparator Neil Graham and to the artists that we had the pleasure of working with over the past several months, Rebecca Manias, Kim Roberts, and Sheelah Tolton.
We’re also grateful to Zach McCann-Armitage and the Wondercrawl crew, Courtney Holmes and Aimée Dawn Robinson from Arts Underground for their incredible support, and to the residency partners – Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre, Arts Underground and Yukon Arts Centre – for providing spaces for the artists to create and present their work.
CURATORS
Heather LeDuc has worked as an archivist, visual arts curator, and communications analyst. Originally from British Columbia, she has called the Yukon home since 1999. She is grateful to Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé for the invitation to co-curate the 2021 Chu Niikwän residency.
Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé is an Upper Tanana member of the White River First Nation. She’s an independent curator, visual artist, and MFA student at Concordia University. She is thankful to Heather LeDuc for making this experience a wonderful one.
REBECCA MANIAS
This body of work is the continuation of a series of paintings created over the last year and focuses on ideas of non-traditional abstract portraiture. These portraits are of people who identify as women, non-binary, trans, fluid, etc. These people are considered ‘other’ and are typically sexualized and objectified in traditional representations of western art, as dictated by the ‘male gaze’. The term ‘male gaze’ was popularized by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey and art critic John Berger. This refers to the ways in which we view bodies other than male through a lens that is predominately CIS male and based in objectification. There are a number of people, throughout history, who have actively challenged and moved away from this idea, realizing that their knowledge of art and gender has been shaped mainly by white male historians, artists, curators and general arts admin. Feminist movements, LGBTQ2S+ and non-conforming artists, have all created work to subvert the heteronormative CIS male gaze. Through these movements, there has been a shift in art. There is an acknowledgement that not all bodies are either male or female, and not all lenses are male. Artists have and continue to labour to represent these bodies in a multitude of ways to help them gain visibility.
I am purposefully moving towards a different dimension of portraiture, where the body is not the focus, or used in an exploitative manner, as often happens with individuals who are seen as ‘other’ in popular western art history.
During my time in the Chu Niikwän Artist Residency, I was influenced by the Yukon River and its intensity. This felt connective to my own work and the concepts I have been engaging with surrounding gender. I view myself as a strongly fluid person and believe that people and other living creatures, do not all fit the gender binary construct (male, female) that has been popularized in the last few centuries. I believe it is our fluidity and dynamism that gives us our true creative potential.
Building on inspiration from the Yukon River, I wanted to make these portraits more dimensional and sculptural. They are intended to seem as though they are emerging out of the wall and into the gallery. Working with materials including yarn, foam, paint, cloth, and the process of punch needling, the work takes on an inviting yet visceral bodily quality. You may want to touch them (please do not-they are very delicate), but maybe they also repel you with an interior anatomical quality. Similar to the portrait paintings I have made, these sculptural paintings were created through intuition, contemplation and collaboration with the subjects they represent. The process for these pieces started intuitively as I created a palette while meditating on each person. From there, I would meet with the subjects and talk to them in order to obtain a greater sense of who they are and anything they gravitate towards. This is the collaborative part of my process. With this information I sketch and continue to contemplate the individual I am presenting. They start to develop as colours, shapes and patterns. These portraits intentionally lack any serious definition of body shape or gender. They move and transform like all natural elements.
Biography
Rebecca is a visual artist whose practice focuses on painting, printmaking, and mixed-media art. They are strongly influenced by the legitimate and fictionalized interpretations of the occult, primarily as it relates to feminism and mysticism. Rebecca received their M.Sc. in Contemporary Art History from the University of Edinburgh in 2010, and a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from McMaster University in 2007.
Rebecca has participated in group and solo exhibitions throughout Canada and the U.K., and is also actively engaged in a curatorial practice, scenic design and art direction for various artistic projects and productions within Canada. Rebecca currently resides as an uninvited settler on the traditional territories of the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council and Kwanlin Dün First Nation.
KIM ROBERTS
I was first introduced to stained-glass ten years ago through a local workshop and from there have continued to develop my skills. I use the copper foil and solder method. Each piece is hand cut, hand foiled and soldered. I enjoy using non-traditional methods to frame my artwork such as snowshoes, reclaimed window frames and handmade wooden frames using reclaimed wood. Many of the stained-glass pieces created for this exhibition reflect my love for the rich Yukon landscapes that surround me. The animals, vast mountains that surround us, rivers, changing seasons and beautiful midnight suns make up the backdrop for several of these pieces. I was drawn to stained-glass because it is never static, as the light changes throughout the day so does the beauty of a stained-glass piece. For me personally this past year has been a difficult one as an Indigenous person. Creating art has helped me navigate my way through it, it’s been the light on dark days, it has brought a sense of comfort and solace. I’m grateful I’ve had an outlet to channel my energy. It’s my hope that these pieces bring a little light and a smile to your day.
Biography
Kim resides in beautiful Southern Lakes, Yukon. She is of Cree/Metis decent with familial ties to Northern Alberta. Kim's an emerging visual artist who works in the medium of stained glass & mosaics. She was first introduced to stained glass thru a glass workshop she participated in over ten years ago. It was that workshop that fueled a newfound passion. In recent years Kim has started sell her artwork thru local craft fairs, private sales and commissions. Kim enjoys using reclaimed/recycled materials such as reclaimed barn wood, old wooden window frames, snowshoes, and antique finds. "Over the years I've amassed an oversized collection of glass things...Oil lanterns, depression glass, marbles, insulators, fishing floats, railroad lanterns, beach glass. Naturally I was drawn to stained glass. It’s the light, it shines thru a piece and you see its true beauty. I love that about glass objects."
SHEELAH TOLTON
Sheelah Tolton
Birdhouses are a strange category of object- a man-made home for a small subset of species deemed attractive, built into the aftermath of ecosystem and habitat destruction resulting from the construction of our own homes. While birds do have their own preferences, these are largely easy parameters to meet: a small, high, hard to access opening leading to a safe and dry cavity. This provides a base to design from that is largely unimpacted by constraints of budget, material, site, or zoning. Consequently, birdhouses are often created as miniatures of our own dwellings, or as a miniature fantasy of the owner’s concept of an ideal home.
In creating a series of birdhouses, I wanted to explore the boundaries of birdhouse and human home, dream and reality, and where the two may or may not meet.
Biography
Sheelah is an artist and architectural designer living in Whitehorse, Yukon. Her artwork is created in a range of mediums including ceramics, acrylics, pen and ink, graphite, and more. Throughout all formats, she draws aesthetic inspiration from boundary conditions and spatial balance- changes in light, shift of season, interplay of forms, and contrasts of material.
Conceptually, this extends to the boundary conditions between human habitation and the natural world. Her past explorations of this topic include pieces speaking to the effects of human habitation and introduction of invasive species to New Zealand, and most recently, an ongoing exploration of ceramics pots for the growth of orchid and bonsai: two families of plants whose existence in everyday life exemplify human ideals of beauty only possible through significant intervention, including cultural methods such as irradiation, cloning, and decades of careful pruning.
Past Exhibitions
