The Natural & The Manufactured: Metamorphic Environments
Scott Evans, Emi Honda & Jordan McKenzie "Boreal Growths and Other Disturbances" 2010 Detail Courtesy Odd Gallery
Dawson City may be the destination of choice for hordes of outdoor-adventure tourists each summer, but for the past five years, it has also proved to be an exemplary centre of contemporary art-making with Odd Gallery’s annual exhibition series “The Natural & The Manufactured.” Organized as the summer focus of the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture’s artist-in-residence program, the exhibition is designed to examine “the meaning of geography and the geographies of meaning” and “the transitory nature of ‘nature’” found in the northern landscape and the local community. In an era of mobile art practices and with past residents including Peter von Tiesenhausen, Peter Flemming, Brandon Vickerd, Stephen Kelly and Harrell Fletcher, the series gives new relevance to the notion of being “off the beaten path.”
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Scott Evans, Emi Honda & Jordan McKenzie "Boreal Growths and Other Disturbances" 2010 Installation view / photo Jordan McKenzie |
This year’s edition is no exception. For the exhibition “Boreal Growths and Other Disturbances,” Victoria artist Scott Evans and Montreal-based duo Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie have filled the gallery with a metamorphic sculptural environment built from Dawson City refuse, automated musical instruments and sub-arctic mushrooms. Spreading through the space in what curator Lance Blomgren has called “a complex network of stream-of-consciousness installations,” the work suggests a precarious balance between natural design and human excess, offering a microcosmic take on the macrocosmic competition between natural and manufactured forces. In the parallel site-specific exhibition “Vague Terrain,” Montreal artist Donna Akrey upturns the architectural principle of terrain vague, or the unused/undefined space of urban environments, for a series of interventions staged across the city. In one work, she has strategically placed a series of “nonuments”—small stone sculptures cast with the word “sorry” or with the imprint of a miniature subdivision and patches of artificial turf—as a kind of absurdist critique on the value of public art and public space. In another, she turns a local community art festival into an “assembly line” collaboration to fabricate stones, lawns, icebergs and other conflicting icons of the urban and natural environment. (2nd Ave & Princess St, Dawson City YK)
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Donna Akrey "Vague Terrain" 2010 Detail / photo Donna Akrey |
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