For the Love of Dunes
Battling wind that whipped sand across faces and canvases, 15 artists hunkered down in the Carcross sand dunes to document the area’s beauty.
Supporting the Girls
Breast health. It’s a phrase that might sound as boring as the ingredients from the side of a good-for-you bran cereal box. That is, unless Patti Flather has something to say about it. And the Whitehorse playwright was recently hired to say a whole lot about it. This spring, Flather saw an intriguing play about …
Subarctic Sessions
The subconscious is so much smarter than we give it credit for. I’m not anti-technology. I can’t be, since technology is what’s allowing me to take on this awesome job as co-editor of What’s Up Yukon, and to continue living in Dawson City, the wild northern town I’ve grown to love. But so often it’s …
Subarctic Sessions: In Praise of Winter Baking
December is a perfect time to indulge my love of baking. Not only will people eat more – they’re in a festive spirit – but the cold kitchen floor, impossible to warm when it’s minus 40 out, becomes more bearable if the oven’s on all afternoon. As the sun shows itself less each day, I’ve …
Things Float Up Magical
Rosemary Scanlon made a digital garden once. And working in Photoshop for hours a day drove her to pick up paintbrush and watercolour again. Through the Looking Glass shows the results at Baked Cafe on Main Street in Whitehorse, along with new images she completed this fall. Scanlon is interested in story-telling images of all …
To Music, Together
Has anyone heard of archerfish?” Joe Cooke describes how this fish can see both above and below water, and he encourages the musicians ringed around him to split their vision too – by looking at him and at their sheet music. Laughter ripples around the group as the image sinks in. Cooke, a guitarist, banker …
Playing For Change
One of the best ways to catch people’s attention is to bring the heart into the equation. That’s exactly what two local women’s organizations hope to do as they present a night of music, poetry, art and film during the 12 Days of Action to End Violence Against Women campaign. The Victoria Faulkner Women’s Centre …
Writing Circumpolar Space
Temperature and light extremes are similar across circumpolar countries, but comparing the waterfronts of Whitehorse and Reykjavák might reveal interesting contrasts in what “North” means. Writing Space is a writing competition hosted by Arctica Magazine, an emerging online arts and literature publication. Writers of poetry, short fiction or creative non-fiction are invited to submit work …
Portable Weatherproof Husks
AYukoner goes south and falls into both pleasure and lament. Oh, Vancouver. I come to visit you and what do you do? Rain, rain, rain and then some rain. A fraction of the showers are botanical – the cherry blossoms in their final days falling in pink damp halos around the trunks of trees – …
Build Me Up, Mentor
is the result of 10-month-long learning relationships between master artists and mentees
Personal Migrations
In the Yukon Arts Centre’s Public Gallery, the Open Season exhibition presents work by four artists with relationships between Yukon and Ontario: two from Ontario who live here now (Douglas Drake and Scott Price), and two Ontarians who have been transients in the territory (Jenn E. Norton and Elinor Whidden). Carrying the hefty subtitle “Intermigration …
Touched by Type
New Delhi 2006. February, not too hot but dry and warm enough for dust to mix with exhaust as my India-experienced friend and I walk the last few blocks toward Old Delhi, on a mission for pink peppercorns from the spice market. The dust mixes with a familiar smell of ink but it’s the sound …
Satellites and Other Evolutions
Ididn’t mean to trust Google so much. I knew in some corner of my mind that Google Earth constructs images from satellite data, but it’s easy to slide into believing that the continuous image feed when you “fly” through a canyon in the software program must be based on photographs. The Creation of Evolution is …
Love It or Leave It
Sometimes late at night I make believe I am sleeping next to someone so I don’t feel so alone. A meandering row of worn, travel-marked suitcases tracks its way along the wall of the Yukon Arts Centre’s Community Gallery. Above them, personal statements, typed on cream-coloured paper, form a gentle arc that belies some of …
Klondike Catwalk
In a show of pre-season energy akin to athletes’ pre-game excitement, Parks Canada interpreters Carrie Docken and Carly Sims gallantly put on their copies of 100-year-old fashion and posed for What’s Up Yukon last week in Dawson City. Sims’ tea dress is a replica of the styles Martha Black and other Klondike pioneering women, of …
On Fire at 5 AM
Book-lovers of all kinds and all ages are about to enter an exciting week as two literary festivals come to the Yukon. Five writers will appear at both the Live Words Yukon Writers Week (April 27-May 3) and the Young Authors Association Conference (April 28-29). Brian Brett brings luscious poetry; Claire Eamer combines humour and …
Table Tennis Convergence
Whether you trained in a strict three-month clinic in China, or take your games in casual doses at a community centre, this weekend’s Yukon Table Tennis Open Championships is a chance to bring your ping pong game out into the spring. The two-day event is a mixture of fun and focus. For some long-time Table …
The Constant Ukelele
Pat LePoidevin’s new album Highway Houses embraces the extremes of Northern seasons – the heat, the cold and the mysterious, romantic moments in between. LePoidevin grew up in Princeton, BC, a small town surrounded by forest. He now tunes his ukelele in Sackville, NB, but spent last summer in Dawson City. A life so far …
Weaving Between the Lines
Blurred black-and-white words fill the walls and part of the floor of the ODD Gallery this month, as Caitlin Erskine-Smith’s text-inspired weavings inhabit the Dawson City art space. Three of the four different works in Missives present layers of words that are mostly or entirely unreadable. They are blends of texts, recalling the way thoughts …
Women in Pigment and Time
Shelley Hakonson, like many Yukon visual artists, connects with audiences outside the territory by showing work across the continent. Last year the Dawson City mixed media artist exhibited in New York City’s Agora Gallery. This week, Hakonson’s solo show The Women in my Life opens at Galerie 240 in Ottawa and runs until November 23. …
Summer Fortitude
Supplies!” A brightly painted sign at the far end of the Confluence Gallery in Dawson City sits in front of a 15-foot deep collection of styrofoam, scrap wood, bubble-wrap, unrelated paint cans, and more. The “surprise” of the “supplies” in the pun-filled sculpture exhibition is not that these items were scavenged from the local landfill. …
Internet Jukebox
People who enjoy sharing music files with friends don’t need to change their habits, says guitarist and songwriter Bill Henderson in a lead-up interview to his talk at the BreakOut West conference in Whitehorse this Friday. Henderson will present a talk on behalf of the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) that addresses the need not …
Shifting Prairie Spaces
Imagine a dark, slender, vertical shape leaning into the distance. If there’s nothing else in view that indicates scale, it can be hard to tell if it’s a twig fairly nearby or a human far off against the horizon. Anyone who’s spent time on tundra, prairie or sweeping shoreline will know this experience. In a …
Let’s Talk Tubers
One of the first things I did when I moved to the Yukon in April 2009 was take a gardening course with legendary Klondike gardener Dawne Mitchell. Most of my previous veggie-growing experience was on the West Coast, where you can practically throw seeds in the ground and return in a couple of months to …
Random Acts of Sunlight
This summer I learned that random acts of sunlight, a broken lawnmower and tolerant neighbours can lead to a lot of delicious, surprising salad ingredients growing all over my backyard. Instead of the monoculture of lawn, there’s a botanical array of 50 shades of green between the greenhouse and the door. My landlords are away …
Out of the Forest
Humans are attracted to animals on an instinctual level, yet more than 50 percent of us now live in urban settings, worldwide (as of 2008). This collective experience creates a substantial gap in how we understand foxes, coyotes, beavers and other wild animals whose habitats intersect with ours. A dual exhibition in Dawson City’s ODD …
