Ice Follies 2008

Jeannie Thib, Cache, 2008

Materials: Used ice hut, hand-cut fabrene, wood

It is strange how an artist, a good one, can turn up everywhere. It takes so little to trigger a memory. I looked through the frost patterns on our sunroom window one freezing morning last week and marveled at how the frost had appeared to embroider and thereby essentially redesign the tool shed standing just outside the window. I made a photo of it, because it looked enough like Thibs modified-ice-hut work, Cache (2008), to prompt my revisiting of that work I never saw in person and the rest of Thib’s remarkable production.

Cache was a temporary, site-specific work, commissioned for the annual Ice Follies that was truly a reaction to the site of Lake Nipissing. When the artist looked out the hut that had been appropriated for her she decided to wrap the dilapidated blue hut in a rough wooden grid.

The process involved her enclosing an already existing ice hut in a cube membrane of a frost-like, semi-translucent white tarp made of fabrene, hand-cutas was usual with Thibin a repeated ornamental pattern that continually modified and was, in turn, continually modified by changing light conditions and intensities. The art enveloped the structure and seem to retrieve the cube, bringing it back to its essential objectness. Cache also examined the connections between the simulated, the artificial, and the natural.

Overall, there was much about Cache, that was quintessential Jeannie Thib.

Artist Bio:

Jeannie Thib is originally from North Bay but lived in Toronto for many years. Her work is well-known across Canada and internationally. At the time of Ice Follies III, she had been working on site-specific installations and public art commissions along with her gallery practice. She was also interested in the 19th-century faience patterns and how they formalize and decorate across media.