Nicole Bauberger

Nicole Bauberger is a painter, writer and performer living in Whitehorse. She is one of our Original 12 writers and has contributed to What's Up Yukon since our first issue February 9, 2005. Along with her many freelance articles she has had a number of columns.

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The Phoenix Burns Brightly In Fort Nelson

John Roper, general manager of the Phoenix Theatre Management Society, greets me with friendly enthusiasm. His love for the theatre and his love for his audience shine warmly in all of his stories.

Air North food service

A Convivial Conveyance

Flying to Toronto on Air North: relaxation. No change of airline, no transfer of luggage. I figured they were also going to feed me.

Come out and see your friends

Drawn Together: embroidered portraits and Doortraits: Intimate Pandemic Images. Meaningful to a Yukon audience. Look for faces you recognize.

For our children tomorrow

Closeup of Velma Olson’s beadwork on Sidney Anderson’s 2015 graduation dress [one_half] To my mind, Honouring Our Future: Yukon First Nations Graduation Regalia is among the most important art exhibits to take place in the Yukon over the past 10 years. I invite you to consider the effects the art processes displayed have on the …

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The owl that beckons

If you have lived in Canada for any time, you will likely recognize her work, even if you weren’t sure how to say her name. Kenojuak Ashevak’s image, “Owl’s Bouquet,” is featured on Canada’s $10 bill.

Take the tentacle

In this time, when we cannot easily travel, Shuvinai Ashoona’s exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre offers to take you to imagined worlds you never knew existed.

The Artist in the Window series concludes and continues

Yukon Artists @ Work([email protected]) continues to host the Artists in the Window series until the first week of September for paid demonstrations and artist talks. This way of working will continue, altering the way artists work their shifts. Two more artists are still to come – Jackie Dowell-Irvine and Jeanine Baker. [email protected] hosted two major art events this …

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Whitehorse poet’s defiant reading marathon

It was the first time Peter Jickling had read a book aloud cover to cover. He reflected that he got a different sense of the book as a whole than you would putting it down and picking it up, as we usually do.

The bead goes on

Weekend symposium brings together beaders from across Canada Last year there was a beading conference in Toronto. It was organized in conjunction with Beads They’re Sewn So Tight, an exhibition of contemporary beadwork curated by Lisa Myers at the National Textile Museum. I heard a lot of people say they wished they could go, especially around …

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Pulling as a team in Toronto

The Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre Sewing Group would like to encourage you to see their work in Indigenous Purpose, an exhibition featuring their nine dog blankets and two podium banners. It’s on display at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto until Jan. 5, 2020. It’s part of the Festival of Cool: The Arctic, which opens with a Dec. 10 …

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Fresh Art for the Territory’s Newest Gallery

Gallery 22 takes wing with its first solo show. Dan Bushnell’s ravens fly through areas of layered colour or urban environments across the gallery’s white walls above Triple J’s Music shop. Straight black paint, sometimes with blended-in white highlights, carry the shapes and forms of Bushnell’s ravens. These ravens inhabit an abstract or urban environment, …

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Evoking kintsugi

Whitehorse artist Leslie Leong applied for a residency at the Ted Harrison Artists Retreat to work towards a large show at the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery in the fall of 2019. But she had lots of other ideas to work through first, both larger and smaller. At the artists’ retreat, on Crag Lake, she was …

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Changing northern skylines: Mary Ellen Read and the art of collaboration

I meet the architect Mary Ellen Read at the cocktail bar Woodcutter’s Blanket in Whitehorse. With a grin she guides me around the windy corner to show me a pit, where you can see the log building’s basement’s concrete exterior, a face normally covered by earth. She checks with James Maltby, the owner of the Woodcutter’s, …

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What Masks Reveal

At the Northern Front Studio this January, you can visit a variety of inner worlds in Whitehorse resident Claire Strauss’ exhibition of face-based wall sculptures, called The Mask Within. While this art show is part memorial for Strauss’ father, each piece creates its own whimsical world, incorporating a joy beyond the bounds of grief. Many …

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A Strong Indigenous Female Presence at Arts Underground

Two new exhibitions curated by Jennifer Bowen Allen, of the Dene Nation, opened Sept. 2 at Arts Underground. In the Focus Gallery, a group show called Hands of Time: Bush Women on the Land honours the way that women who live on the land have supported cultural continuity by maintaining their traditional practices. In the …

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Mushroom Confidential

I wrote this in 2013 for Dave Mossop at Yukon College as part of my course requirements for NOST 201, A natural history of the North. However, it had been rattling around in my head for some time. Please do not use this to identify a mushroom; get expert advice. I’m going to tell you …

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A portal to the world

Yukon artist Lawrie Crawford imagined a gallery, an airy space with high ceilings and big beautiful windows. She could picture Suzanne Paleczny’s sculpture of Icarus hanging there. With that vision an idea was born. Crawford and her colleagues in the Southern Lakes Artists Collective were inspired to create a gallery space filled with a wide …

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The Human North

Three photo-based shows currently on exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre all aspire to convey something of the experience of living in the North. Of course there is no “the” when it comes to north; there are many norths. In my opinion, the exhibits were most successful where they conveyed a particular place, inhabited by …

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Bright Colours, Divergent Stories

Two brightly coloured shows of paintings adorn the walls of Arts Underground. While they share intense palettes, their worldviews contrast profoundly. The Things You Know by Whitehorse artist Heather Von Steinhagen offers a surreal, disturbing outlook, while Leaps and Bounds by Marsh Lake artist Ferryn Nowatzki depicts a more light-hearted vision. Dystopia reigns Von Steinhagen’s …

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Many Worlds of Words

In Whitehorse we rarely see a group show that’s international in scope. In Words – International Exhibition of Haiku and Handmade Paper, the concept tying the works together is simple: many objects in our lives amount to words on paper. This exhibition offers an astonishing variety of variations on this theme, from a wide variety …

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Art show at the YAC until May 28 explores colonization

All three exhibitions currently on display at the Yukon Arts Centre’s public art gallery have to do with colonization. Joseph Tisiga: IBC 1st Hole: Death Prophecy Denied Joseph Tisiga’s paintings in watercolour and acrylic surround an interactive mini putt course in IBC 1st Hole: Death Prophecy Denied to create a critique of the Canadian government’s …

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Telling Stories

Sandra Grace Storey’s Words Like Birds exhibit digs deep into all that we struggle to express. It finds a great tenderness there. Storey has created an exhibition of small, focussed sculptures for the solo show room at the Yukon Artists @ Work Co-operative art gallery. Storey works in stoneware ceramics coloured with earth-toned oxides. White …

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Separate Realities come together at Northern Front Studio

Scott Price has come home to Whitehorse from a year away in Guelph, Ontario. His new sculpture show, called Separate Realities, emerged from the process of inhabiting these two places. Separate Realities is on exhibit until the end of April at the Northern Front Studio, in Waterfront Station. It includes wall pieces and sculptures. The …

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Heidi Hehn is Raven Mad

Heidi Hehn is crazy for ravens. It’s a taste she shares with many northerners. These big, black, intelligent birds bring wilderness into the city. Sometimes they bring that wildness closer than you’d like it, for example, when they tear apart the garbage in the back of a pickup truck. However, many people really appreciate their …

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A welcoming sewing circle

Have you got a beading project you’ve been trying to finish? Do you want to learn more about First Nations traditional sewing? Florence Moses hosts a sewing circle Wednesday evenings from 5-9 p.m. in the office of the Nacho Nyak Dun Development Corporation, located in the Yukon Inn Plaza on 4th Ave. You can come …

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Get Your Greens

Whet your appetite for lunch on Lillian Loponen’s new canvases at the Yukon College Hilltop Bistro this fall. The show, called Touch of Green: Enchanted Places, explores the colour green in washes and gestural brushstrokes. The show will be on display at the College’s fine dining lunch restaurant until mid December. Jacqueline Bedard, the Director …

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Quilting Hotbed

To descend the stairs into Bear’s Paw Quilts is to descend into colour. Quilts and colourful fabric samples line the walls. This is more than a fabric store. It’s a school, and a conduit to a world where quilting is the art of choice. Quilter, business owner, and teacher Ruth Headley attributes Bear’s Paw’s twelve years …

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“Splintered Craft” Art Space now open

The Skookum Jim Friendship Centre is providing well-known Yukon artist Joseph Tisiga with a chance to undertake an exciting project that’s close to his heart. Splintered Craft, a drop-in art studio for youth, now open in Yukon Plaza across from Tags, at 4230 4 Avenue. But get in there soon; its current funding only lasts till …

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Paint Dances With Ideas

Because of the cerebral nature of her work, Lawrie Crawford describes herself as an “outlier” in the Yukon, where landscape painters predominate. Measuring Space, Lawrie Crawford’s solo art show at the Northern Front Studio in Waterfront Station, opened at the beginning of October. However, Crawford will offer an artist talk at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday …

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Mysterious Bicycle

You may have heard about the bicycles stolen from Cadence Cycle in July. But did you hear about the one that mysteriously appeared? Around July 9, an old one-speed with a coaster-brake showed up in front of 506 Wood Street, just beside Cadence Cycle. It stood on a kickstand, with an old sprung Dunlop saddle, …

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Tobogganing, Adult-Style

The last time I was sledding with Casey Lee McLaughlin, she took me out at the knees. But then my dog rode her and her crazy carpet down the hill, like a snowy surfer, growling at the base of her neck. So that was okay. McLaughlin loves sledding. Her weapon of choice is a crazy …

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Main Street Confidential

So… have you gone to the Yukon Government Main Administrative Building to see your art yet? I understand, life gets busy. But I bet you’re on Main Street once in awhile. There, you’ll find three Yukon Government offices that serve as public exhibition spaces from the Yukon Permanent Collection — art that belongs to the …

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Two New Galleries and Many Small Fishies: Back streets and Main Street

Another one caught: Ceramic artist Sam Dickie went to Dawson City as Artist in Residence with KIAC and created a show called Stand in the Odd Gallery last fall. And then — like so many others — she fell prey to the spell of the Yukon. She and her partner and one-year-old daughter MacKenzie were …

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Mixing Business With Pleasure

The Yukon Government Administrative building is chock full of art. Located on 2nd Avenue at Hanson Street, the site boasts 22 works from the Yukon Permanent Art Collection – the most of any of the locations featuring the public collection. I felt like an intrepid explorer, going there with my list of works to track …

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Inspiration From the Northern Seas

Glaciers calve into the ocean. A polar bear lounges and stretches. The rigging creaks as the canvas sails fill with wind. One walrus surfaces. And every night lasts 15 minutes longer, while dawn and dusk stretch on for hours. Whitehorse artist Jane Isakson digests these experiences, which she will develop into large-scale acrylic canvases over …

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Yukon Permanent Art Collection (YPAC): Art Gallery

Yukoners, you are the proud (or perhaps unaware) owners of the Yukon Permanent Art Collection (YPAC). The collection holds over 350 artworks in trust for you. The collection includes paintings, beadwork, weaving, textiles, sculpture and carving. Some of them are in storage, but about half the collection is always on display in public offices, for …

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‘Artrepreneurship’ on Training Wheels

Andrew Finton, of the Sundog Retreat Carving Program, likes to point to Calvin Morberg as one of his successful young carvers. Today he has a long way to point. Morberg’s off on a cultural delegation to Siberia. Four and a half years ago, Morberg sold his hand-caved masks out of towel-lined shoeboxes on Main Street. …

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Artrepreneur: Sundog Carvers Sink Teeth into Snow

Young artists from the Sundog carving program have turned from wood to snow. Until Feb. 23, you can see them carving six eight-foot square blocks of snow at Shipyards Park. They will not be carving alone. Eight professional snow carving teams from across Canada and the United States started carving at midnight on Feb. 20 …

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Artrepreneur: Rogue Raven Art Show Perches on Downtown Kiosks

Vince Federoff kneels in the January snow. He presses brass thumbtacks into the downtown poster kiosk. He’s taken care to cover only an out-of-date poster from New Year’s Eve. He steps back and we admire the graceful composition of his photograph, simple among the shouting posters. It shows two ravens perched on a Ken Anderson …

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Rabbit and Raven

The Storey of Raven and Rabbit was originally planned for New Zealand. Sandra Grace Storey, born and raised in Whitehorse, spent her childhood summers in a cabin on Tagish Lake. At 18 she moved to Calgary for art school. Then she sailed to New Zealand. New Zealand has no ravens, no predatory mammals and little …

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Artrepreneur: Grass is Not Greener in Yellowknife … But It Has An Awesome Gallery

The Birchwood Gallery in Yellowknife shows top-notch artists from all over Canada. It also shows the work of local high school students. Yellowknife contrasts Whitehorse in interesting ways. It’s a northern capital of about the same size, so you can’t help compare. It has high-rise buildings instead of mountains. It’s pretty much the end of …

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Artrepreneur: Art to Share Spirit

SYANA’s first annual Yukon First Nations Arts Festival will have a strong visual arts and crafts focus. That’s what the society’s members asked for. Executive Director Sonny Voyageur had SYANA members fill out a questionnaire. Most said they would like to see the society’s activities focus on visual arts and crafts. Voyageur finds that arts …

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Artrepreneur: Photographer Helps Protect Canada’s Artists

BY NICOLE BAUBERGER It’s a common Yukon experience. You’re at the board meeting, looking around the table. There’s a vacancy in a leadership position. “I don’t know enough,” you think. But as you look around, well, you can’t ask the new board members to do it … This happened to Whitehorse photographer Mario Villeneuve this …

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Warm As Tea

Dang. I thought I was early. Practically the whole class is here already, heads bowed over their work. I look at the clock. It’s only ten to. Aha. All these ladies (and one gentlemen) have lots of beading to do. I’m taking part in a moccasin-making class. Shelby Blackjack shares her skills with easygoing encouragement. …

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Artrepreneur: Bike Shop Makes Room for ‘The Gritty Gallery’

There’s a new gallery in town … but only for a little while. Five artists will display their artwork in Philippe’s Bicycle Repair during the three weeks leading up to Christmas. Photographer Mario Villeneuve, painter Nicole Bauberger (ahem, me), assemblage artist Scott Price and metal sculptors Katherine Alexander and Philippe LeBlond met in LeBlond’s bike …

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Freedom Opens for Stace Pshyk

It’s seldom that the Yukon Gallery clears its walls to feature one artist. Solo shows haven’t been the focus of the commercial gallery and frame shop. But gallery owner Brenda Stehelin has made space for Stace Pshyk’s work to take centre stage. Pshyk’s show, Freedom, marks his first solo show in the territory, though his …

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Building a Show Together

Boats, fish and human figures cavort through the Yukon Art Society Gallery in Paul and Jeanine Baker’s Fired and Formed exhibition of collaborative works in metal and glass. In Autumn Wind, twisty spot-welded twigs cling to a burl to suggest a wind-blown tree. Torch-worked leaves scatter across the plinth as if blown off by that …

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Artrepreneur: Hunter, Dentist, Artist, Priest

Beautiful portraits of the people and dogs of Colville Lake, NWT, encircle the Yukon Arts Centre Community Gallery. Arctic Journal was put together by Deb Jutra in honour of Bern Will Brown. Jutra knew the artist as Father Brown, her Catholic priest when growing up in Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Brown arrived in the Arctic in …

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Yukon Past and Present

Bold strokes of the present, intriguing photographs of the past: two new shows at Arts Underground offer you the Yukon in stereo. Simon Gilpin displays After the Fire at Arts Underground until Feb. 23, and The Andover-Harvard Yukon Expedition, 1948, which will remain in place until early April. After the Fire Gilpin, who moved to …

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Artrepreneur: A Retreat Opens Its Doors Wider Still

The Ted Harrison Artist Retreat hopes more artists and arts organizations can benefit from the gorgeous space it has to offer. To that end, it has changed its programming policy a little. Robin Armour, a photographer recently retired from YTG, has been involved in the program since its inception when Ted Harrison donated the land …

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Yukoner President of National Arts Organization

Whitehorse’s own Mario Villeneuve has just been elected president of Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC), Canada’s national association of professional visual and media artists. It’s the first time a Northerner has held the high-profile position. CARFAC is legally appointed to negotiate with national organizations on behalf of all visual artists in Canada …

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Amber Church, Her Yukon Adventure

“She sat in silence and was overwhelmed by serenity.” “She embraced change.” “She faced the challenge.” Each of Whitehorse artist Amber Church’s newest paintings in Yukon Ho at the Yukon Artists @ Work Gallery until Feb. 12 includes one line of text, all of which began with “She.” The texts read something like encouraging affirmations …

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Come and See Your New Art

Val Hodgson has painted a portrait of Bob Atkinson, Willow Bob, in oils. Atkinson is affectionately known as “Willow Bob” for the bent-willow chairs and other rustic furniture he makes. A portrait in oils is “usually reserved for the elite,” Hodgson observes in her artist statement. But in her portraits, she seeks “to celebrate the …

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Drums Supporting the Solo Voice

When you step into the Solo Show Room at the Copper Moon Gallery, you’re greeted with a sense of rhythm. A row of women raise their hands in thanksgiving. Painted images of masks present a raven from different angles. Four drums repeat themselves across a canvas. Repetition and groups of similar items create the rhythm. …

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Artrepreneur: Art Investigates Illustration

Cathleen Collins has taken some of the strategies used in illustration and has pushed them through acrylic paint to create a show that’s well worth seeing. Exploring Illustration at the Chocolate Claim is Collins’ first show. The young artist has been working for the summer at Arts Underground. She’ll go back to school in the …

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Expansive Mark-making and Education

What if a gallery contains only a few works, with room to breathe between them? Whitehorse artist Joyce Majiski’s new shows at Arts Underground offer a refreshing change from the busy salon-style hangings that characterizes many art presentations in the Yukon. Majiski offers two shows in the basement gallery until January 29; visit Gros Morne …

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Through a Troubled Lens

Through the two photo-based art shows on now at the Yukon Arts Centre Public Gallery, curator Earl Miller asks us to look at the troubled side of the landscape. A well-worn ride-on park toy rusts at the forest’s cut edge; another image draws the viewer into a close-up view of double smokestacks on a coal-fired …

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Artrepreneur: What’s Made and What’s Not, in Art

“What’s that thing on the dike?” “It’s art!” “I thought it was an accident …” … comments from the public overheard about Brandon Vickerd’s Northern Satellite installed in the lawn in front of the dike in Dawson City. The Natural and the Manufactured is a series of artist talks, lectures and art installations, in its …

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The Peace of Collecting

Stepping into the Solo Show Room at the Yukon Artists @ Work Co-operative, this month, feels wide open and peaceful. To create Stones Bones Berries: The Art of Collecting, Kerry Fletcher has removed the moveable walls that transform the sunroom into a picture gallery. She’s hung strings of rosehips in front of the windows and …

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Sharing the Wealth, Creatively

Amber Walker feels grateful for her lot in life: her husband supports her financially so she can pursue her interests as a visual artist and playwright. Over the past year, in Whitehorse, she has had many opportunities to pursue her artistic interests. David Skelton of Nakai Theatre is helping her as she develops her play. …

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Mac Underground

Marlene Collins wants Arts Underground to be more than a place for artists to show their art or to take or teach a course. She wants artists to spend time there. She hopes to do this by providing more services. Arts Underground proponents seek to support artists, to provide fertile soil for them to grow …

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Artrepreneur: A Visual Feast … and Then Some

Arts Underground was packed on Nov. 20. Not only was the Yukon Art Society Christmas show opening, but Yukon Women in Music was holding a fundraising auction there, the same night. Local artists and businesses had decorated birdhouses. Northerm Windows adorned a birdhouse with glass mosaic and frosted mirrored walls. Kim Beggs’ surreal and whimsical …

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Artrepreneur: From Illustrations to Intrigue

Original black-and-white illustrations for The Midnight-Blue Marble animate the maroon walls of Baked Café for the month of December. A grid of 15 pieces of illustration board, each about 12 by 16 inches, fills the larger wall between the street door, the one that is currently closed during construction and cold weather, and the gelato …

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Artrepreneur: My Big Backyard from the Bradens’ Backyard

BY NICOLE BAUBERGER Yellowknife needs more showing space for emerging artists. High rents in that city make the cost of wall space very high. But that hasn’t stopped Rae Braden. It’s the Circle Square Mall, Yellowknife, the last Friday night in November. Braden has turned one of the empty stores into a gallery to present …

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Painting & Play

A flock of whimsical little paintings hobnob on the walls of The Chocolate Claim – over coffee, so to speak. Janelle Hardy’s five- by seven-inch works on paper, all in identical white mattes and dark frames, are scattered across the wall like snowflakes. These simple pieces begin with drawing in ink. Shapes are then filled …

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Artrepreneur: From the Arts: Multivitamin Colour

Lara Melnik, queen of craft fairs and cafés, has created an intricate and colourful show of work in polymer clay at the Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery. If February seems black and white and grey to you, Polychrome could be the antidote. The title wall reflects Melnik’s well-known status in the community. Her name …

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Artrepreneur: For the Young at ‘Art

There’s a gorgeous new gallery in town. You climb the stairs at the back of Triple J’s Music’s new location, past a potter’s wheel, past walls lovingly embellished with graffiti, past a purple bicycle with a purple-patterned velvet banana seat. Then you come to the entrance of Gallery 22. Professional-quality vinyl lettering lists the artists …

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A Man of Many Materials REVIEW

Mark Preston’s show at Arts Underground is titled with his name, then subtitled with a list of materials. To Wood Stone Metal Cloth Sculpture Jewelry Painting could be added “paper, drawing and a kind of printmaking”. The show acts as a kind of portfolio of Preston’s various kinds of work. It includes two portfolios of …

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From the Arts: Homeless Dreams

Entering Chris Reid’s Bunny Days show at the Yukon Arts Centre is like walking into a surreal story book. Buildings and slices of bread have chicken legs … in her drawings, skeletal cats pour coffee from automatic drip coffee makers … doll-like female figures, with crosses for eyes, stand limp-limbed in large rubber boots. In …

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From the Arts: A Large Show of Small Works

Rosemary Piper’s work is familiar to Yukon audiences. She’s a faithful exhibitor at the Yukon Artists @ Work Cooperative Gallery while the North End Gallery shows her reproductions. She has shown in Skagway for many years, and can be counted on at the Cranberry Fair and the Fireweed Market. New Works 2010 offers viewers her …

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Outside the Lines

Brushy hard edges, soft edges of colour flowing into one another; bold graphite squiggles, brushed plonks of colour that hover above the rest in their chromatic intensity. I love to write about art. I love to stand before the piece and have the experience, then try to put that into words. My intent is to …

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Painter in the Ditch

I’m painting the road. When I tell people that, they figure I’m painting the yellow line some different colour. What I’m actually doing is stopping every 50 kilometres on the drive from Edmonton to Whitehorse and painting a picture of the road and the landscape it’s travelling through. I paint it where it curves right …

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Art Show Supports First Nations Youth Retreats

The view from the top of the Mackenzie Mountains has inspired a show of new artworks. The beauty of that setting also inspired the artists to donate their artworks to support a program that brings First Nation youth to the area for environmental education. There are three more days to check out the Dechenla Artist …

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The Men Behind The Boys

The Guild will open its season this week with the Canadian premiere of The Boys, written by Kris Elgstrand. Elgstrand and Brad Dryborough, the play’s director and Elgstrand’s “longtime production partner,” agree that it’s a simple play. With a lot going on. Each of the “three characters, in one room, in real time” has one …

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Clay and Wonder

Sandra Grace Storey’s show, small changes, grows out of a love of clay and myth. All but one of the pieces mount on the wall. The clear white gallery walls give them the context to leap or stand with strong presence. Storey’s faces and animals have always had a quality of aliveness. I think her …

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Artrepreneur: Spruce Bog in the Summer

One of Whitehorse’s favourite Christmas craft fairs has reproduced. About 40 different craft makers, artists, authors and artisans will showcase their work at the Yukon Crafts Society’s Artisans’ Market Gift Shop this summer. The Yukon Crafts Society is best known for producing the Spruce Bog Christmas craft sale. The society has turned the old Trapper’s …

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Artrepreneur: On the Road with Cass Collins

Cass Collins’ new show at the Chocolate Claim draws from a common Yukon experience: the drive up or down the Alaska Highway, between here and Outside. The show includes images of bison, bighorn sheep and a club sandwich with fries. It’s good to see diner meals juxtaposed with the wildlife. They add a human element …

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Artrepreneur: Watching the edges

Judy Matechuk’s show Through These Eyes succeeds best where she works deliberately with edges. On the walls at Arts Underground you will find textile pieces made of glass laid over pieced-together fabric landscapes which may be stitched or paint-altered. Sometimes photographs are digitally printed onto the fabric to create a background landscape, instead of piecing …

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From the Arts: Beautiful New Additions to Your Gallery

In the lobby of the Yukon Government Administration Building, just behind the library, you can see this year’s eight new additions to the Yukon Permanent Art Collection. The collection “belongs to the people of the Yukon,” Tourism and Culture Minister Elaine Taylor stressed in her speech at the show’s opening. The show, entitled Capture, includes …

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Holding Still

Adad Hannah’s Cuba Still (Remake) takes video installation to a minimalist place. Videos are usually moving pictures with sound. But Hannah asks his models to stand in silence. Quiet ambient clicking sounds make only understated use of the medium’s sound capabilities. Like Agnes Martin’s minimalist canvases of pencil lines and thinned white paint, the strength …

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Love and Be Loved

A feeling of human warmth beams from the eyes of the people in Norm Hamilton’s black and white portraits on the walls in the Guild’s Other Room. Portraiture, for him, is more than capturing an image. It’s about “capturing the essence of that person.” Environmental portraiture is key to his work. This means sitting down …

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Artrepreneur: An Uneasy Wonderland

Valerie Salez gives voice to her mixed feelings about beauty in Fourth Nature up at the Yukon Arts Centre. Italian Renaissance grottoes inspired this show. Salez was fascinated by those layered spaces. One generation of art patrons commissioned artists to create “sculptures, murals and architectural friezes” in caves as part of elaborate and controlled gardens. …

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[email protected]’s New Home

Saws spin, putting walls in at 200-120 Industrial Road, the new home of the Yukon [email protected] ([email protected]) Cooperative. The new windows frame scenes of the Takhini bluffs. You can catch sight of the Yukon Arts Centre in the distance. Up a newly rebuilt set of stairs, beside Twisted Stitches Embroidery shop, the gallery is under construction. …

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Terra Firma’s Artist Show Their Passion Projects at Gallery 22

The Terra Firma Art Company on Third Avenue in Whitehorse bills itself as your “promotional product company”.They put images, logos and text onto products, mainly garments, helping businesses and teams brand themselves. Men of Terra Firma showcases the artists behind this commercial endeavour. Terra Firma workers Chris Blaker, Adam Green, Matty Marnik, Allen Moffatt and …

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Artrepreneur: Partially Buried in Spring-Sprouting Dawson

Gold Show weekend in Dawson City. The town teems with things to do, businesses starting up for the busy tourist season and fresh young faces just come north to staff that season. Runners compete in the Henry Gulch 5 K run and win gold nuggets. Bombay Peggy’s hums after the Odd Fellows Ballroom empties of …

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A Trip into Canadian Contemporary Art Scene

Canadian contemporary artists found a wider audience in Massachusetts last spring. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) presents more than 60 Canadian artists, including three artists from the Yukon, until April 2013. Oh, Canada, billed as “the largest survey of contemporary Canadian Art ever produced outside Canada,” offers the viewer an adventure. If …

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Luxuriate in the Moss

Most Yukoners love the microcosm of moss and little alpine plants that contrasts with our grand vistas. The snow has not yet melted from that rich soft fabric. Lyn Fabio’s verdant veerings gives us a preview. Light ochre, dark greens, dull greens, and glimpses of red root the show in a limited, unifying palette. This …

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Hot New Art Band

There’s a new jazz trio out at Crag Lake. But instead of sound waves, they’re jammin’ in glass and steel. Rusty Redbrun (Paul Baker), Burny Hüle (Ken Anderson) and Ptina Green (Jeanine Baker) aim to have 20 works for their collaborative show opening next week at Gallery 22 in downtown Whitehorse. “We just decided to …

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Artrepreneur: Vastly Entertaining

Cruelty makes good comedy. There’s something fascinating and often hilarious about watching one character tear into another. And as the Song of Songs warns us, jealousy is as cruel as the grave. The Guild/Sour Bride co-production of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage brought the opening night audience to helpless laughter. I sat in the first row …

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Artrepreneur: Each word sings

What’s in a word? In the hands of Peter Jickling and his friends, each word has its own voice. You can listen to those voices at the Word Project: A Treatise on Resonant Philosophy at the Old Fire Hall May 14-20. “Only” is spelled with small letters, and faint swishy marks around it. It gave …

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Artrepreneur: Visit Another North

Karine Genest offers us a view of Churchill, Manitoba during the polar bear migration season during her show Un Autre Nord: Les Ours Polaires de Churchill, at the Centre de la Francophonie on Strickland Street. A selection of digital photographs turns a lens on the largest, whitest and furriest temporary residents of that community on …

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Birds in wrench

Artrepreneur: Birds in Wrenches, Birds in Landscape

Paul Baker and Rosemary Piper share the solo show room at the Yukon Artists @ Work ([email protected]) co-operative gallery this month. Piper’s framed watercolours line the walls. To left and right, many smaller paintings make a more intimate installation. On the back wall, where you get a longer sight line, midsize works cluster. The invitation …

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Looking In 3 Directions

Walking into Arts Underground these days, an impression of bright colours swirls around you. White, tan and black play their parts, but many solid areas of bright colour in all the artists’ work tie the show together. Alice Park-Spurr, Jane Isakson and Marlene Collins have teamed up to create a show called Transformations. The first …

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Approachable Artists in the Tombstones

The Yukon’s beauty stuns. And yet even in this context the Tombstone Territorial Park stands out. It’s a kind of iconic distillation of the Yukon’s beauty. This summer, you’ll be able to see that landscape through the eyes of 10 artists, through the Art Magic in Tombstone program coordinated by Friends of Dempster Country and …

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Peeling the Veneer

Two sets of well-to-do parents meet in a well-appointed living room to discuss a small problem in a civilized manner. One of their sons has hit the other with a stick, damaging two of the latter’s teeth. Yasmina Reza’s script starts with the matter of dental bills, but more importantly, an apology that’s meant to …

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Maps Exploring Paint

Jesse Devost’s current show at Arts Underground, the grass is greener, maps out new places with paint. As a whole, the exhibition encourages us to think about about the way we use space, crowd it, and pass through it. Devost has only been painting since 2007. Trained in geography and having worked 10 years as …

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Looping Time

The overhead lights are dim in the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery. As you step inside, a flickering tells you you’re entering the realm of video. All three shows currently in the gallery are video-based. One way to look at video is to see it as a kind of photography or drawing, with time added as …

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Artrepreneur: Yukon Summer Art Trade

So far, the Yukon’s art market seems somewhat insulated from the economic uncertainties that are undermining art sales outside the territory. I asked four arts-related businesses – two in Whitehorse and two in Dawson City – how this summer’s tourist trade went for them. Delwyn Klassen, who works at the Yukon Gallery on 2nd Avenue …

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Yukon Artists Find a Common Thread in Multitudes

I was keen to see Multitudes, a show at Arts Underground by artists from the Studio Gallery Association, because it’s a theme I’ve seen in other Yukon artists’ work. People who think about Yukon art often wonder how to characterize it; to a large extent, it’s the product of a diverse group of individuals rather …

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100 Steps Further In

Faro-based artist Jackie Irvine set herself a challenge. What if she painted one painting a day for 100 days? Starting October 1, 2011 she did just that. And every day, even if she was stranded in Whitehorse without her acrylic paints, and had to go buy oil pastels to do it, she kept her commitment. …

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Step this way for hilarity

We meet our Canadian protagonist, Richard Hannay, played by George Maratos, in his West End London flat. It’s the mid-Thirties and he’s bored. So he decides to go to the theatre. This cures his boredom. It will cure yours. In Hannay’s case, a mysterious woman takes a seat next to him, shoots into the ceiling …

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Artrepreneur: Pants on Fire: Sam McGee and the Illusive North North

North has never been true, exactly. We know that. It’s a relative kind of thing. Even if you look at a compass, you have to correct for the fact that Earth’s magnetic pole resides a bit over from the North Pole itself. This adjustment becomes more important the farther north you go. Santa Claus lives …

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Dreamers Awake

If I did not believe that reason could bring something of value to the imaginative process I would not bother writing about art. I offer my observations in order to beat down a path in the snow to the art shows, to encourage my readers to see them, and to offer language as a tool …

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Art Galore at YAC

The Yukon Arts Centre teems with art this month. You can check out the ATCO Play Your Part Art Contest, Anna Crawford’s photographic exhibit North, and Surface,a show of this year’s additions to the Yukon Permanent Art Collection. As part of its support of cultural activities during the Arctic Winter Games, ATCO invited students in …

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Invitation to Inner Journeys

The two solo shows by Louise and Janelle Hardy on display at the Yukon Arts Centre this fall invite viewers into the artists’ personal, emotional worlds. Both of them move into and through grief and heartbreak. Interestingly, this makes a place for viewers to reflect on their own experiences of the darker times. The Trousseau …

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Mechanical Improvisation

People like to ask: “What is Yukon art?” Such a small population generates little by way of trends or movements. Most artists are, to one degree or another, in a class by themselves. Philippe LeBlond is one such artist. He takes his engineering background, his experience as a bike mechanic and his commitment to reuse …

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Showing Commercially Outside

As the summer high season for art sales slips away, artists might find themselves thinking about showing in cities outside the Yukon, where the high season for art sales occurs in the fall and winter. It sounds like a no-brainer. It’s an accepted fact that the Yukon art market must be small because our population …

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From the Arts: Stories Still Waiting to be Told

Ruth Qualliarialik Nuilliak’s “Tundra” is the first thing you see of the show Nunavut’s Culture on Cloth at the Yukon Arts Centre. It transfixed me. The tundra is so hard to paint, with its patches of vegetation, its incredible close-up detail. Nuilliak has taken it down to an abstract gesture which evokes its complexity in …

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Lots to look at

Each of Meghan Hildebrand’s paintings sets out a rich site within which your imagination can roam. Let me invite you into “The Royal Game of Us,” just inside the doors of the Yukon Arts Centre’s Public Gallery. Stylized, cut out collaged doglike animals, and possibly ponies, leap across the canvas, legs extended in opposite directions. …

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Beyond Therapy

Beyond Therapy Jenna Walchuk has a story to tell. Years ago, she was an addict. She’s been clean for many years, yet the need to go back to the emotions she remembers from that “time of such intellectual darkness” structures her art show, and her investigations in paint. The story leads us around the Gallery …

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Art Glass Blossoms in Downtown Juneau

May’s “First Friday” walk in Juneau, Alaska included 10 art openings and events downtown in the state capital. At the Canvas Community Art Studio and Gallery on Seward Street, a group of five Southeast Alaskan glass artists offered a whimsical show that included a wide range of glass-working techniques. Beyond the Pane: Artistry in Glass included …

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A Visual Voice

Wendy Whitemore has lived alone on the land in Ontario for 10 years before embarking on about 10 years of solo travel. During those travels she explored Canada’s North, ranging over the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Being alone suits Whitemore: “I don’t feel alone when I’m on the Dempster. I feel totally connected to the …

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Feast at the Yukon Arts Centre

Michelle Moreau and her potter partner Patrick Royle want to assure purchasers of local pottery that no glaze used on Royle’s or any other local potter’s dinnerware contains lead. It’s bad for the potter working with it, too ….. Phyllis Fiendell’s wheel-thrown, handmade stoneware is on display in the plexiglass boxes in the Yukon Arts …

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Artrepreneur: Solo Shows in a Cooperative Environment

Way in the farthest back room at the Yukon Artists @ Work Gallery, a series of shows has been planned to span the next two years. The back sun room of the gallery posed problems for hanging artwork: “It was all glass and tin,” explains the group’s founding chair and current gallery manager, Harreson Tanner. …

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