Past Participants
Joanna Priestley (March 20 - April 12, 2012)
DCISFF Filmmaker in Residence
A guest of the Dawson City International Short Film Festival, Priestley will screen a selection of her short animations and host a Q & A as part of this year's program. While she is in Dawson, Joanna will also work on a new animation about what it means to grow old and to be an elder in modern society.
JOANNA PRIESTLEY has directed, produced and animated 24 films that explore abstraction, botany, landscape, aging and human rights. She has had retrospectives at MoMA (New York), Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland), REDAT (Los Angeles), Stuttgart Animation Festival (Stuttgart, Germany) and the American Cinematheque (Los Angeles) and has received fellowships from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, American Film Institute, MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaíso and Millay Colony. Priestley teaches animation workshops worldwide, was founding president of ASIFA Northwest and has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992. Her films are available on DVD from www.primopix.com or Microcinema International.
Colin Huebert
(February 3 - 28, 2012)
Dawson City Music Festival Songwriter in Residence
The Dawson City Music Festival and The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture are excited to be hosting COLIN HUEBERT as the 2012 songwriter in residence. Colin returns to Dawson City after having visited us with the Great Lake Swimmers in 2007. Colin has since absconded from the band to focus on his own project, Siskiyou, his collaboration with Great Lakes Swimmers compatriot Erik Arnesen. Colin will spend the month of February in the historic Macaulay Residency where he will be recording new material and developing work for Siskiyou. In addition to his own work, Colin will also be hosting a songwriter’s circle and sharing his talents with some of the students of our local Robert Service School.
Bill Burns (January 11-25, 2012)
Yukon School of Visual Arts Artist in Residence
BILL BURNS is a multi-media artist who works in sculpture, photographs, multiples and books. His gallery installation The Veblen Good: art, fuel and celebrity was presented as part of the ODD Gallery's The Natural & The Manufactured project in August 2011. A guest of the Yukon School of Visual Arts, Burns will be working with the YSOVA students in Charles Stankievech's 4D class during his time in Dawson.
Bill Burns was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria and an MFA from Goldsmith's College in London, UK. His projects such as, Safety Gear for Small Animals (1994-2007) and Bird Radio and the Eames Chair Lounge (2003-2011), have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Bienal del Fin del Mundo (Ushuaia, Argentina), and KW - Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin). Since 2008, Burns has exhibited projects at the Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK), MKG127 (Toronto), Tensta Konsthall (Spanga, Sweden) and Kunsthallen Nikolaj (Copenhagen).
billburnsprojects.com/
Ed Pien (January 12-26, 2012)
Johannes Zits (January 12-26, 2011)
Yukon School of Visual Arts Artists in Residence
ED PIEN uses drawing, papercuts, performance and video to create large scale installations. While in Dawson, Pien will be working with students in Veronica Verkley's 2D class at the YSOVA.
Ed Pien is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. He has been drawing for nearly 30 years. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, he immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of eleven. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from York University in Toronto and Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. Ed Pien has exhibited nationally and internationally including the Drawing Centre, New York; La Bi- ennale de Montreal 2000 and 2002; W139, Amsterdam; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Middlesbrough Art Gallery, the UK; Centro Nacional e las Artes, Mexico City; The Contemporary Art Museum in Monterrey, Mexico; the Goethe Institute, Berlin; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; as well as the Na- tional Art Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. As an art instructor, Ed Pien has taught at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Ontario College of Art and Design. He currently teaches part-time at the University of Toronto. Pien is represented by Birch Libralato in Toronto, Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain in Montreal and Galerie Maurits van de Laar in The Hague.
www.edpien.com/
JOHANNES ZITS works with and combines digital imaging, collage, photography and painting to focus on the body. His work intends to draw attention to both the conventional image-making process as well as the ways images from mass media are disseminated and consumed. While in Dawson, Zits will be working with SOVA students and on performance and video work which will be shared with the community.
Johannes Zits received his BFA from York University in 1984. He has shown both in Canada and abroad. Zits travels widely while pursuing his art research. His extended stays in various cities include Taipei, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Shanghai, Manchester, Hamburg, Santiago, London and Berlin. In January 2008 he presented a major solo exhibition highlighting his many disciplines at the Centre DíArt Contemporain de Basse Normandie, Caen, France.
www.johanneszits.com/
Ursula A. Johnson (December 2 - 19th, 2011)
URSULA A. JOHNSON of the Mi’kmaw First Nation utilizes performance, installation and traditional Aboriginal art forms to create conceptual works combining images and elements from a multitude of sources that explore and challenge ideas of ancestry, identity and culture. Johnson is part of the 2011-12 Visiting Aboriginal Artist Series hosted by the the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre & Yukon School of Visual Arts.
During her time in Dawson Ursula will present an artist talk at DZCC, host an open studio at Macaulay House, and visit Old Crow and Robert Service School, in addition to working on her own studio practice.
A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Ursula A. Johnson lives in Halifax, NS. Her work has been featured in The Coast, Visual Arts News andExpressions, her performances have been part of Prismatic and Nocturne in Halifax.
Caitlin Erskine-Smith (October 31 - December 12, 2011)
Erskine-Smith’s MISSIVES is currently on exhibit in the ODD Gallery until the end of November. Focusing in textiles, her work incorporates traditional techniques to consider modern conflicts of identity, language and change. Caitlin hand weaves large-scale pieces that explore the challenges inherent in communication and understanding. Through a labor and time intensive process, layers of text are woven together, their legibility and meaning obscured in the process.
During her time in Dawson, Erskine-Smith will work on a series of weavings based on letters to family and friends, reflecting on her time in Dawson City. Since her arrival at the Macaulay house she has been writing a letter a day along with a line drawing on velum to accompany the text. These two layers will be used as the basis for woven versions of the letters, where the layers will be intertwined rather than overlaid, incorporating image and text into one piece.
CAITLIN ERSKINE-SMITH was born in Toronto, and has studied art and design in Europe, South America, and at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. She has exhibited in numerous juried exhibitions across Canada and Internationally, including Unity and Diversity, at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in Korea, at Nuit Blanche and Luminato in Toronto, and at Nocturne, in Halifax.
www.scattermint.com
Curtis Grahauer (October 31 - November 30, 2011)
Curtis Grahauer is a Vancouver based artist and filmmaker whose social art practice involves fun, community and a DIY spirit. Grahauer is part of the collective Weekend Leisure, who collaborate with artists, musicians, comedy groups, and filmmakers to produce short video sketches, public access television shows, and karaoke videos and events. He is currently collaborating with a group of Vancouver filmmakers, comedians and musicians to put together Steel Viper Force: Fiero's Redemption, a feature-length homage to direct-to-video action movies of the 80s and 90s, which is directed by Grauhauer.
During his time in Dawson, Curtis will be working on film and video projects, and will be hosting community events including a karaoke night and film screenings.
In addition to his work with Weekend Leisure, CURTIS GRAHAUER curated Public Access: 1999 & Beyond for the Helen Pitt Gallery and has collaborated on various internet shorts with Vancouver comedians and performers. His recent projects have been included in the LIVEPerformance Biennale and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto. In June 2012, he will be an artist in residence at SÍM in Reykjavik, Iceland.
http://steelviperforcemovie.com/
http://www.weekendleisure.ca/
Joi Arcand (September-October, 2011)
JOI T. ARCAND is a photo-based artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan currently residing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her photo work merges the personal with the political through the use of her own family history in addressing the Canadian aboriginal experience. Drawing from her family narratives, Arcand’s work connects memory and landscape with humour and nostalgia, while asking questions about what it means to be a mixed-race Aboriginal woman. She became interested in her own family's history through her work with the Muskeg Lake Community Archives, where she compiled old photographs and interviewed Elders in the community.
While in Dawson, Arcand will be working from her grandmother's collection of family snapshots to create embroideries with her own hair, which she recently cut specifically for this project. She will also be building a miniature replica of her family farm using found materials and family photographs, which will be re-photographed using stereo-photography.
Arcand received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with Great Distinction from the University of Saskatchewan in 2005. She has served as chair of the board of directors for Paved Arts in Saskatoon and was the co-founder of the Red Shift Gallery, a contemporary aboriginal art gallery in Saskatoon. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, York Quay Gallery in Toronto, Mendel Art Gallery and Paved Arts in Saskatoon, grunt gallery in Vancouver, and published in BlackFlash Magazine.
Jp King (September-October, 2011)
Jp KING's story-telling techniques attempt to unpack popular American & Canadian mythologies in whimsical and historically slippery ways through collage, writing, and book-making. Seeing the collage-original not as an end, but instead as a means to a final print, he often enlarges his works to make visible the delicacy of paper and ink . Through a digital process the original becomes an inexhaustible plate from which variable prints are pulled. He uses language much like a painter uses a palette. Relying on absurdity to refrain from finger-pointing at what is upsetting, King uses humour as a practical device to deliver a softened sadness and emptiness in the world. In trying to understand his own masculinity, relationships, and fragmentary family unit, he carries, and lays to rest, a handful of feelings surrounding heroship and failure.
While in Dawson Jp is working on a series of collages and a new manuscript that explores a post-information, post-history future, in which a band of miners seeks documents from buried landfills of the past, while battling another group that wishes to not look back.
Originally from Toronto, Jp King has lived in Montreal for the last six years, graduating from Concordia University, and then managing a small print shop. His book of poems and illustrations We Will Be Fish, was published by PistolPress in 2008. He is moving to Toronto to start his own unique print-production facility called Paper Pusher.
www.paperpusher.ca