In 2004, the W.K.P. Kennedy public art gallery coordinated the first Ice Follies exhibition upon the flat white expanse of Lake Nipissing (at 600 square kilometers one of the largest lakes in Ontario), bringing together artists from across Northern and Southern Ontario, from various art-making communities, under curator and gallery director Dermot Wilson. Wilson’s intention in mounting this exhibition was to get art out of the gallery and explore what happens in a non-traditional setting, with projects such as this allowing for a different kind of interaction between artwork and viewer. For Ice Follies, artists created temporary public artworks that echo or metaphorically address, or incorporate the idea or the reality of an ice-fishing hut and installed these works on the frozen lake.

North Bay and the WKP Kennedy Gallery were perfectly situated for this project. The city is located on the shores of Lake Nipissing and is traditionally known as one of Canada’s best ice-fishing locations. ICE FOLLIES featured snowmobile, walking, snowshoeing, and skiing tours of the seven sites and allowed the gallery to present contemporary sculptural artworks in an austere, yet interesting (and unavoidable) setting, while at the same time celebrating our community and our Northern landscape.

Although the WKP Kennedy Gallery has a long history of gallery exhibitions and participation in cultural events across the city and region, Ice Follies was a first for them. The artists chosen were asked to bring to the project their own ideas about the wilderness, architecture, our relationship to nature or lack thereof, the whimsical in public spaces, and the ironic connections between contemporary art practice and a disappearing wilderness. The artists invited to participate had also worked with structures and assemblage or within the politics of hunting.

Ice Follies worked closely with the Ministry of the Environment in North Bay to ensure that artworks were respectful of the lake and the environment and that the icy sites were returned to their original state after the three-week run of the exhibition.

The opening reception for Ice Follies took place on Friday, March 5, 2004, with snowmobile tours beginning at 11 am, Saturday, March 6th. Taken together Ice Follies balanced the profound with the fanciful, the spiritual with the sensual, and the unorthodox with the practical. It celebrated both community and creativity. Far from being a folly, this project showed itself to be smart and engaging. Simply put: Ice Follies is cool. The show’s success prompted an arrangement to present the exhibition in a biennial cycle.

Liz Lott is a painter, photographer, and art educator who came to this project with many fond memories of ice fishing with her grandfather on Lake Nipissing. For the duration of the show, Liz was on the ice taking images, three and four times a day, including before sunrise and after sunset. She studied fine art at Concordia University and has exhibited her work in several juried exhibitions throughout Ontario. Her images from Ice Follies have been featured in Espace, Artichoke, and Sculpture magazines.

In 2004 and 2006 Liz was invited to be the official photographer of Ice Follies. Her photographs of the festival have been reproduced in art magazines in Canada and the United States as well as in a hardcover book and poster set published by the W.K.P Kennedy Gallery.

Gil McElroy has curated exhibitions for the public are galleries and museums in Canada and written for magazines in Canada, the United States, and Australia. A selection of his catalog essays, articles, and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001). In 2001 he was awarded the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts. McElroy is the author of two books of poetry: Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001), which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry, and NonZero Definitions (Talonbooks, 2004). His visual art has been exhibited in public galleries and artist-run centers across Canada.

Eileen Sommerman is a writer, curator, and artist who lives in Toronto and Paris. Her Essay for the 2004 Catalogue was written in Southern India where she has been traveling for much of 2005. Sommerman’s curatorial practice is site-specific and she works primarily in public spaces. Her exhibitions include: Intercourse: two videos and a painting, in a vacant warehouse, Toronto (1999), In Lieu installations in public washrooms, Toronto (1998), Centrifugal, installations in parking lots, Hamilton (2000), and Being on Time at Central Tech High School Toronto (2000). She founded a contemporary art space called Head Space at Holt Renfrew in Toronto. She is a regular contributor to Canadian Art, Artfan (Melbourne), and Inversions (Winnipeg) and in 2002 was the managing editor of C Magazine. She graduated from the University of Toronto with an M.A. in 1995.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Dermot Wilson has worked as an arts administrator and Director for several artist-run centers as well as the W.K.P Kennedy Public Gallery in North Bay where at the time of Ice Follies, 2004, he was working as the Director/Curator. He has worked as an arts writer for several publications and as a media arts instructor at two Ontario universities. For the past decade or so, he has collaborated with Windsor video artist, Chris MacNamara in a presentation collective called machyderm inc. Dermot resides in North Bay, Ontario, where he has facilitated several new media projects through www.variflux.tv, and collaborated with topologist, Dr. Murat Tuncali on a media installation called: Pseudo-Arc for the People. Dermot’s fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in BlackFlash Magazine, C Magazine, Mix Magazine, Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, and various gallery publications.