As the culminating exhibition in Nicole Bauberger’s stint as emerging curator of the Atco Electric Youth Gallery, up at the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC), monsters and flowers created by children will fill the hallway gallery for the month of May and beyond.
The Winter Garden has been on display for the months of March and April in the sculpture garden at the Yukon Arts Centre. In a Sunday-afternoon Kids Kreate session, at YAC, families painted flowers, butterflies and anything they thought should be in a garden, onto cardboard. In the end, this included a bear and a banana. These were cut out of the cardboard and installed out in the snow, so that the imagining of the garden would sustain us through the winter.
An earlier version of The Winter Garden has also blossomed in the snow through the whole winter in the Dalton Trail Trail Gallery, an ad hoc gallery of sculptural installation, in Hillcrest, that Bauberger began when galleries closed due to Covid. It was painted by Bauberger’s neighbours.
As the snow starts to (hopefully) melt, Bauberger will gather up the winter-worn pieces and hang them in the Youth Gallery.
Through this garden, monsters will parade.
These monsters were painted by students at Elijah Smith Elementary School and the Individual Learning Centre, in Whitehorse; the J.V. Clark School, in Mayo; as well as during another Kids Kreate session at the Yukon Arts Centre. The Elijah Smith monsters paraded down Hamilton Boulevard, the Friday before last Halloween; and the Mayo monsters just paraded, on April 22, through their town.
In addition to their exhibition parade, some of the monsters will stray, at the end of May, from the Youth Gallery into the Main Gallery, for a short tenure in the larger space. Stay tuned for news of other events, hopefully including another actual Monster Parade, the last week of May and early June.
These events will wrap-up Bauberger’s tenure as emerging curator at YAC, which was based on her true enjoyment of children’s art and her desire to share it with a wider audience.
However, the Monster Parade will go on. Bauberger will be making mini monsters, with the public, at Arts in the Park, June 20 to 24. Watch for monsters in The Puppet Path, which Nakai Theatre will bring this September to Wondercrawl, along the Whitehorse Waterfront. She is also scheming monster parades in her youthful hometown of Peterborough, Ontario, this October.
