The Natural & The Manufactured 2018
Klondike Institute of Art & Culture
Dawson City, Yukon, Canada
August 16 – September 22, 2018
INFO/FLOE
JOSH WINKLER
(ODD Gallery)
LINDSAY DOBBIN with ANGIE JOSEPH-REAR, MICHELLE OLSON, MATTE MORGAN
(Offsite: 88.8FM at ODD Gallery, Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre and the Old Post Office)
CURATED BY MICHAEL MCCORMACK
project website: naturalmanufactured.com
Exhibition Reception & Opening Remarks: Thurs. Aug 16th, 7:30pm
part of the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival
Location: ODD Gallery
Artist Talk with Josh Winkler: Friday. Aug 18, 7:30pm
Location: KIAC Ballroom
The talk will present a brief trajectory of the artist’s work, their recent Chilkoot Trail Residency experience, and finish, by discussing a new collection of works created in Dawson for KIAC’s ODD Gallery exhibition.
Curator’s Talk: Sat. Aug 19, 7pm
Location: KIAC Ballroom
Curator Michael McCormack discusses the approaches of both participating artists in this year’s exhibition INFO/FLOE. Through discussing this project he hopes to further understand our complicated and problematic relationships with the environment and promote media literacy, cultural production, and public access to an extensive variety of media. In what ways do we remain connected with each each other throughout generations, across vast distances, through remote sensing, skill-sharing, mark making, collective human memory, and experiential learning? How have all forms of media been utilized or exploited to communicate through time and distance?
Off-site audio installation: 88.8FM
Locations: ODD Gallery, Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, the Old Post Office (3rd & King)
Receive Transmit Receive Transmit involves artist Lindsay Dobbin working remotely from the Bay of Fundy, connecting with three Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens – Elder Angie Joseph-Rear, Michelle Olson and Matthew Morgan – over a vast distance in order to share land-based knowledge and experience together, finding resonance between two places — the Yukon River and the intertidal zone of the Bay of Fundy. Improvised actions emerged out of collaborative listening, some of which leave temporal traces in the landscape. The project explores how
kinship with land can be deepened through sharing and how the space between places can disappear through the combined use of modern technologies and the original form of communication: speaking to the land.
Three lo-fi transmitters are installed throughout town: at the ODD Gallery, Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre and the Old Post Office. Each transmitter is broadcasting to 88.8 FM, and features conversations Dobbin had with the three local collaborators.
Borrow a radio receiver, tune to 88.8 FM, and walk the land — listening to the environment and the dialogue between two places. Also be aware of residue in the landscape from these exchanges. The route is up to you.
We’re grateful to Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation for being continuous stewards of this land, and for welcoming this project.
CFYT 106.9FM: CONVERSATIONS with the artists and curator
Throughout the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival tune in to CFYT 106.9 FM to listen to conversations between The Natural & The Manufactured Curator Michael McCormack and artists Lindsay Dobbin and Josh Winkler.
Commissioned Text: by Exhibition Curator Michael McCormack
Fall 2018
INFO/FLOE is a project that brings together work from two methodologies of communicating with the land as archive; through listening and performance, and through synthetic reproduction of found objects. It considers the impermanence and malleability of information, language, experience and storytelling, through time-based, and print-based media. Josh Winkler, and Lindsay Dobbin have developed practices that deeply consider our relationships as stewards, protectors, active communicators and archivists of the natural environment.
During the Natural & the Manufactured residency in the summer of 2018, Dobbin and Winkler will create and present new works that continue their practice of deep listening, research, and correlation with the land, considering the natural environment as an active storyteller, performer, archivist, and foundation to our survival as a species. The final presentation will cumulate during the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival with an installation of Winkler’s work in the ODD Gallery and a temporary performance and a site-specific radio installation of Dobbin’s work with local collaborators.
Involving participatory performance, sound, and installation, Dobbin’s work is ecocentric, using listening as wayfinding. Their work intends to deepen our relationship with the natural world, and bridge our relationships with the natural environment that have been fragmented and scattered through colonization and industrialization.
Josh Winkler’s work involves in-depth research and consideration of materials that are found in the area of the Klondike, recorded and reproduced as manufactured objects. Through bringing these objects into the gallery setting, Winkler intersects his studio work with installation work, bringing materials gathered from his walks and hikes into a place of critical contemplation, thus problematizing, and opening a conversation that reconsiders objects of “historic significance”.
Throughout this project, both artists have been carefully considering the flow of information and how it is experienced, and eventually absorbed by our physical surroundings. It is an opportunity to reflect on how all forms of information intake influences our memories that are passed on through artifact, recorded information, environmental evidence, storytelling, or art making.
– Michael McCormack 2018
BIOGRAPHIES
JOSH K. WINKLER is a Minnesota artist working primarily with traditional and contemporary print media. Since receiving his MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2010, Josh has been creating works on paper, running a small gallery, building a stone cabin, and exhibiting work nationally and internationally. He is currently an Associate Professor of Printmaking at Minnesota State University in Mankato, Minnesota. Winkler’s work stems from an interest in how humans manipulate and label the land. How time, politics, and social change alter the context of both natural and inhabited locations. By combining personal experience with historical investigation, Winkler builds layered landscape narratives to reflect on an uncomfortable disconnect between contemporary Americans and the history of the land. He utilizes a range of drawing, printmaking, and sculptural processes to facilitate these ideas.
http://joshkwinkler.com
LINDSAY DOBBIN is a Mohawk – Acadian – Irish artist, musician, curator and educator who lives and works on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the L’nu. Born in and belonging to the Kennebecasis River Valley in New Brunswick, Dobbin has lived throughout the Maritimes as well as the Yukon Territory. Dobbin’s place-responsive practice includes music, media art, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing, and is invested in and influenced by Indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices, such as drumming. Through placing listening, collaboration and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin’s practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land.
www.lindsaydobbin.com
MICHAEL MCCORMACK is an intermedia artist, curator, and educator of settler ancestry living in unceded territory of the Mi’Kmaq people in K’jiputuk (Halifax). He has worked extensively within the artist-run centre community as Director of Eyelevel Gallery from 2009-2013 and president and representative of the Association of Artist-Run Centres from the Atlantic from 2011-2013. He continues to work as an independent curator for exhibitions, festivals and events, most recently for Nocturne: Art at Night (2016), Flotilla Atlantic (2017), INTERPL/\Y (2017), and KIAC’s the Natural & the Manufactured exhibition (2018). Michael completed his MFA at NSCAD University in 2015 and has been steadily exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions in public galleries, festivals, and artist-run centres since 2003 and is currently a member of Last Chants Studio, At The Reception and Hermes Gallery in Halifax, NS.
www.michaeldmccormack.com