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The Natural & The Manufactured
is a thematic project organized jointly by the Klondike Institute
of Art & Culture’s ODD Gallery and Artist in Residence
Program. This annual event seeks to stimulate and engage artists
and audiences in a re-examination of the various cultural
and economic values imposed on the environment, while exploring
alternative political, social, economic and aesthetic agendas
and strategies towards a re-interpretation of our landscape
and social infrastructure. Conceived as a research, production
and presentation forum, the N&M looks to the
myriad ways in which we both influence and are influenced
by our natural and constructed environments.
Our 6th edition of
the N&M project features six prolific artists,
writers and thinkers whose work shares an ongoing fascination
with ideas of landscape, place and the environment as well
as a general commitment to an ethos of multidisciplinary experimentation.
Together, the projects The Natural & Manufactured
2010 offers a set of speculative propositions toward
a new framework regarding the ongoing barter between our reliance
on natural, often fragile, ecological systems and inherent
necessity of socialization.
EXHIBITIONS
Scott Evans,
Emi Honda, Jordan McKenzie | Boreal
Growths & Other Disturbances
In the ODD Gallery, this trio of long-term collaborators from
Victoria, BC and Montreal, QC present a large-scale, immersive
environment that was conceived, constructed and installed
during their 6-week tenure as KIAC Artists in Residence in
Dawson City. Boreal Growths is a moving, growing
and breathing installation that incorporates natural and organic
material, found and fashioned objects, sculptural elements,
low-fi electronics and sound to locate sites of hybritity
and tension between nature and human society. Part dream world,
part environmental critique, this installation is at once
lush, wondrous, confounding and cautionary.
Donna
Akrey | Vague Terrain
Working in the public sphere, Montreal-based artist Donna
Akrey presents a series of related, overlapping conceptual
elements that function as installations and interventions,
performative gestures and collaborative actions. Working in
Dawson in advance of her project, Akrey will be fabricating
a large sculptural edition of small hand-held objects that
will be scattered throughout town for serendipitous discovery.
Functioning as "nonuments" instead of monuments,
these curious forms--in both their design and presentation--suggest
a non-invasive, symbiotic undertanding of our built environments
and social patterns. Akrey’s second component will take
place as a collaborative production line with in the context
of KIAC’s Yukon Riverside Arts Festival. During the
Festival, Akrey will be on-site inviting participants to watch
and join her in a process of mass-producing objects of “nature.”
A ceremonial public installation of the resulting manufactured
objects will conclude Akrey’s project.
PROJECTS
Christopher
Dewdney
| Strange Days
Dewdney’s writings and lectures are defined by a highly
individualized cross-disciplinary approach to his chosen subjects.
For over 30 years, this Toronto-based writer, poet and cultural
theorist has creating a body of work that routinely draws
upon natural history, media studies, linguistics, literature
and evolutionary biology. For the N&M keynote lecture,
Dewdney will be presenting new, original research into the
reciprocal relationship between our environment and our human
mechanisms for understanding and describing it. Using the
title Strange Days as both a theme and theme song
for his address, Dewdney will be looking at the intimate relationship
between language, evolution, consciousness and technology.
Jen
Laliberte | Post Exhibition Essay
Dawson City writer, teacher and community worker, Laliberte
will be writing a commissioned essay that both documents and
takes critical stock of The Natural & The Manufactured
2010.
PLEASE VISIT www.naturalmanufactured.org
for more information on the projects and artists.
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