Confluence at the SOVA Gallery

The Confluence Series at the SOVA Gallery is a community exhibition series which offers a space for KIAC members working in any medium to exhibit their artwork throughout the summer months. The SOVA Gallery is located in the Yukon School of Visual Arts at 3rd and Queen in Dawson City.

The Confluence Series at the SOVA Gallery is currently taking a break. Find out about past exhibitions below!


2020 Confluence Season:


KIAC’s Confluence Gallery is a summer-long DIY community exhibition series in the Yukon School of Visual Arts (SOVA) gallery. Things were a little different this year – more social distancing, less openings, same great artwork. Instead of four consecutive shows, one exhibition took place, the first from July 17 to August 8, 2020:

6 ft

This exhibition highlighted the works of eight 2020 SOVA alumni in the intimacy of the SOVA gallery, following an unexpected creative hiatus due to COVID-19. After taking space from each other and everyone else, they were eager to share their mixed media works with the community that is built on creating space for dilettantes like them.

Featuring works by:
Saskia Blagaj-Berger
Julaine Debogorski
Nicole Favron
Jenni Matchett
Johannah Quian
Ellen Sillence
Amira Strain
Keith Verbonac


2019 Confluence Season:


Ken Anderson | Lianne Charlie | Fran Morberg-Green

Valerie Salez | Doug Smarch Jr. | Joseph Tisiga

May 23 to September 13, 2019

At Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, ODD Gallery and Yukon School of Visual Arts on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in in partnership with Yukon Arts Centre. Join interpreters at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre for a walking tour of the exhibition, weekdays at 11am.

A meeting, held in August of 1977 between Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau and five Yukon First Nations leaders regarding the then-approved Mackenzie Pipeline, is contained in a document archived in the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government collections.

These minutes of the meeting allows us to be a fly on the wall within a tension filled boardroom. Captured word for word these minutes vividly illustrate the dichotomy of two opposing ways of understanding economic, social and cultural development of a land and its inhabitants. A conversation that simply starts out about the pipeline ultimately became a conversation about First Nations way of life and a declaration for autonomous self-determination.

Through a diverse range of media Yukon artists Ken Anderson (Tlingit/Scandinavian), Lianne Marie Leda Charlie (Tagé Cho Hudän | Big River People), Fran Morberg-Green (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in), Valerie Salez (1st Generation Canadian), Doug Smarch Jr. (Tlingit), and Joseph Tisiga (Kaska Dene) activate this archival document and ultimately continue the conversation surrounding self-determination in the face of federal and corporate agendas.

This event is supported by the Yukon Arts Centre with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

2018 Confluence Season:



Dan Brown, Ursa, 2017

KLONDIKE PRINTS
Featuring works by Rian Lougheed-Smith, Dan Brown, Kim Edgar, Dan Sokolowski, John Steins, Adonika Jayne

May 31 to June 16, 2018


Basia Barb Hinton
The Space Between Things

Patty Jackson
Bear Stories & What the Eagle Saw

June 21 to July 14, 2018

The Space Between Things is about creating something out of seemingly nothing – starting from the place of being at a total loss and leading to an investigation of overlooked spaces. The topography is shaped through intimacy, grief, desire, and blowing things up only to piece them back together. The territory includes outliers and margins, by-products and off-cuts, deconstruction and reconstruction. The interstitial ‘Spaces Between’ may initially appear intangible, but a closer look reveals patterns, myth, story and connection.

Bear Stories & What the Eagle Saw. In honour of the Opening Reception on Aboriginal Day, Heart of Stone (Patty Jackson) invites you to see how the art of Hand Carving was brought to her, how it came from where it began, and how it is being passed on. The Carvings have stories, humour, express an appreciation for wildlife and First Nations Culture and a love story intertwined with the heart of it all.



Images, left: Deirdre Sokolowska / right: Ramon Joseph Santos 

July 19 to August 11, 2018

Ramon Joseph Santos affords us a glimpse into the iconic routine and detail of Dawson City with his canorous landscapes and portraiture.
Deirdre Sokolowska’s series works to disparage their own inaccuracies of perception through gesticulate drawings of paramount figures in their life.


KIAC Members’ Exhibit

August 16 to September 8, 2018


2017 Confluence Season


Dawson Daily News Print & Publishing Festival: An Exhibit of Prints by Dawson Artists

June 7 to June 10, 2017

From KIAC’s own Screen Printing Club, to making prints in candlelit cabins, the printmakers of Dawson City have been busily preparing for the much anticipated 2017 Dawson Daily News Print & Publishing Festival. Our Confluence Gallery exhibit of local prints will kick off the exciting week of festivities by giving viewers a glimpse of all that is possible within the realm of printmaking.




James Healey

Garden Party
June 15 to July 1, 2017

This past winter I have become increasingly interested in colours and how they shape images together and even give them meanings. The simple act of placing one colour beside another can create a dialogue about reality and creation, placing two things beside each other to communicate inside of their own world. Our choices of dialogue with our environment echo each other in colour and form, with only the domination of the one over the other as communication between flower, face, structure and movement. Thus my exhibition Garden Party is an ideology.

Garden Party is a celebration of that unresolvable tension between a loose organic world and our constructed one. Viewers can get lost in the work, ponder the meanings, ideologies and communications.


Meg Walker & Jeffrey Langille
Noisy Pictures
July 6 to July 22, 2017

Noisy Pictures presents the work of two artists who explore relationships between sound and image. Jeffrey Langille has set a static landscape in motion through the act of walking with a camera; Meg Walker creates still images in response to a selection of her ongoing Yukon field recordings through the act of drawing.


Virginia Mitford
Alluvium, To Wash Against
July 27 to August 12, 2017

Alluvium, To Wash Against presents two bodies of work by Virginia Mitford that consider printmaking to be both a subject and medium. A Study of Action and Movement is a series of short video animations that uses an extensive series of multilayered stone lithographs as stills. Through the project she looks at how the repetitive gestures involved in printmaking can ground herself within her body and her physical surroundings, while linking the process of lithography to her childhood experience of a flood. Viscera documents the varied discomforts of her body throughout a month of drawing. Using one plate to make many variations of the shifting image, she also explores the capacity of limestone (used as the printing plate for stone lithography) to change and yet hold the history of mark-making within its chemical structure.


KIAC Members’ Exhibit

Theme: Present / Past
Exhibit dates: August 17 to September 9, 2017


2016 Confluence Season


Krista Davis – Rachael Siminovitch – Carly Woolner
Lifespan of Improbable Loves

May 19 to June 11, 2016

Opening night & performance: Thursday May 19, 6PM
Performance by Carly Woolner & Emily Chudnovsky. Live music by Translucent Grapes.

Lifespan of Improbable Loves is an exhibition in three parts, each telling stories of wild love affairs tasked with the inevitability of letting go. Siminovitch’s watercolour drawings, Davis’ animated video and Woolner’s sculptural space speak to the joy and tragedy that comes from the recognition that we are all caught in a series of fleeting moments and that those we get to experience only happen once.


Justin Apperley
Dust to Oaxaca

June 16 to July 9, 2016

Opening night: Thursday June 16, 7pm
Dust to Oaxaca
is a visual, sculptural and photographic journey of a motorcycle trip taken from Dawson City, YT to Oaxaca, Mexico. This wild and rugged return trip clocked 20, 500 kilometers from the top to bottom of North America; through tundra, northern boreal forests, prairies, rain forest, coastal shorelines, desert valleys, mesa plateaus, tropical mountaintops, and humid lowlands. The road leads to many unexpected turns and the lens captures the beauty, breakdowns and euphoria while flying on the seat of a 650cc engine.


Lindsey Tyne Johnson
Fluō 

July 14 to August 6, 2016

Opening night: Thursday July 14, 7pm

Fluō explores our relationship with water in a fantastical way.

Lindsey Tyne Johnson is a preschool teacher, writer, podcaster and artist living in Dawson City. Lindsey also performs slam poetry and bad ukulele covers on the side. Her podcast, That Time I Slept Naked Under the Apocalypse is available on iTunes.


KIAC Members’ Exhibit 2016: Latitude / Longitude

The theme of this year’s show is Latitude / Longitude in recognition of the expansiveness of both our interior and exterior worlds.

Opening Reception: Thursday, August 11, 2016 from 6pm-7:30pm (as part of the Yukon Riverside Festival Gallery Hop).


2015 Confluence Season


Blanket fort
Robin Henry, Courtney Holmes and Carly Woolner

May 28 – June 13, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday May 28 @7pm

with performances by: Joey O’Neil, Susu Robin and Owl & Antler 

Informed by the deep memories of childhood, Robin Henry, Carly Woolner and Courtney Holmes invite the public to the SOVA Gallery to partake in a wistful incubation inside their blanket fort installation. Prompted by the strong emotional sentimentality of youth and community, the fort will host concerts, poetry readings and other public gatherings in a space designed to remind audiences of the imagination, make-believe and enthusiasm of childhood.


…strange things done…
Dion Fortie, Ryland Fortie, Levi Glass, Eliza Houg, Devon Lindsay,
Bo Yeung & Megan Gamble

Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 17 from 6-7pm

Gallery hours: June 18 – 23, 2015 3-7pm

Threading its way through the works in …strange things done… is an interest in the manner in which early or low-tech forms of imaging, illusion and other communications technologies may be merged with new technology or with what is now the mundane or obsolete technology of modern times. Most of the artists have created works that are self-illuminated; the camera obscura’s optical properties just a starting point for their thinking. Each of the artists in this exhibition is a student or alumni of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD, Halifax), Thompson Rivers University (TRU, Kamloops), or the Yukon School of Visual Arts (YSOVA, Dawson City).


Karen Thomas and Adonika Jayne

Geometry, Mystery and Pluralism

July 2 – July 18, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 2 at 7pm

Regular Gallery Hours: Fridays and Saturdays 3-7pm

An exploration of Contemporary Printmaking re-thinking the conventional and pushing the boundaries of the traditional mediums of woodcut, linocut, etching, mezzotint, and silk screening in exploring compositional harmony, multiples, emotional resonance, and scale as expressive elements.  Marked by a refusal to sacrifice creative expression in a medium that demands technical attention to detail, Geometry, Mystery and Pluralism further explores how innovation and pluralism is integrated through printmaking into multi-disciplined practices of contemporary artists.

About the artists:

Through her explorations in geometric forms, Adonika Jayne seeks to create a sense of tranquility in a world she views as chaotic. The repetitive nature of printmaking and the ability to produce multiples, for Jayne, is a ritualistic experience. As an expression of spirituality, the image and the process are of equal importance. She is inspired by the simplistic beauty of geometry and works to reinterpret the pre-existing space and forms created by patterns and shapes. This is expressed both two dimensionally and through installation work.

Karen Thomas explores the figurative incorporating elements of the abstract in an interdisciplinary approach of painting, collage and printmaking. Through recent explorations in printmaking, ephemeral qualities are explored in a seemingly unyielding medium and printmaking has become a new voice and passion for creative expression


Blair Douglas

Positives Negatives

July 23 – August 8, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 23 @ 6pm
Regular Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 3-7pm

Positive Negatives is a series of analogue photographic projections based on human geography, the construct of identity and the projection there of. The projections are layered and polarity is reversed, layer by layer. The layers begin with nude portraits of subjects in their homes and/or comfortable spaces. The subjects are stripped of the curated elements of their appearance, while at the same time they are surrounded by objects that help to define them as individuals. Next a projection of these images in the negative is cast upon the subject, this time dressed in white, effectively making them a canvas for the projection of their own nude image. Polarity is reversed one more time to achieve double negatives of the original image and leaving a negative imprint of the subject as canvas. As the images undergo these binary switches they begin to degrade and become grainy, resembling a painting, a construct.
The piece is meant to comment on the ways we construct our identities and project them upon the world, and alternately how our identities are projected upon us from the outside. The play between positive and negative touches on how values are constructed and qualitatively assigned, while the degradation of the images through the layering process highlights the illusory formality of the constructs and qualities we use to create and perceive identity.


KIAC Members’ Exhibit

Making Work: An Exhibition Celebrating Craft Year 2015
August 13 – 29, 2015
Opening Reception:
Thursday, Aug 13 from 5:30pm – 7pm (as part of the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival Gallery Hop)

Regular Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 3-7pm

KIAC is participating in Craft Year 2015, a year-long, nation-wide festival aimed at promoting craft as a key player in Canadian Culture and hosted by the Canadian Crafts Federation. Artists interested in submitting work should contact Ange at programs[at]kiac.ca or stop by the KIAC office to pick up a submission form.


2014 Confluence Season


The Klondike Painters Group
May 22 – June 14, 2014
Opening reception: May 22 @ 6pm


Which Witch?
Nicole Rayburn
June 19 – July 12, 2014
Opening Reception: June 19 @ 6pm

Which Witch? is an in-process exhibition of photo and video work which traces the figure of the witch through historical constructions, actual persecutions and the actual  transformations of this character into contemporary representation.


Telluric Floe
Mathias MacPhee
July 17 – August 9, 2014
Opening reception: July 17 @ 5:30 – 6:30pm
Telluric Floe
is an examination of the real and imagined ley-lines of Dawson City.    Constructed through a variety of mediums, this exhibit explores metaphysical electrical patterns through quartz fields, schematic maps and satellite observation.