In February 2010, the W.K.P. Kennedy Public Art Gallery returned to the 4′-thick ice of Lake Nipissing to host the fourth Ice Follies Biennial, a site-specific exhibition of contemporary art works by national and international artists, featuring eight new artworks that consider or thematically reflect the idea of the ice fishing hut. 2010 once again expanded the possibilities of art-making and viewing on ice – including architectural installations and sound art.

Back in 2004, the Gallery started off with the idea that the perfect place for a show about ice-fishing huts was in North Bay. Our city is right beside the vast white plain that is Lake Nipissing in the wintertime. We asked artists to create works that would use existing ice huts or decorate ice huts or incorporate ice huts as pedestals or mini-galleries or would “expand the notion of what an ice hut can be”. The artists responded in so many wonderful ways that those pieces have been seen in the National Gallery in Ottawa and as far away as Sao Paulo, Brazil and Geneva, Switzerland.

In the lead up to Ice Follies 2010, Ice Follies curator Dermot Wilson stated “This year will be the most interactive, most activist Ice Follies yet…and the warmest,” continuing, “With the inclusion of infamous West German artist, Dieter Schweiger, the show will be truly international in scope and profile.”

Several of the artists’ works comment on themes of performance and nature’s power as well as on how the community interacts with the lake in winter.

Wind Hausen is the working title for a large colourful sculptural piece by Wernemunde artist, Dieter Schweiger. Schwieger will create a multi-colored  “tentacled” form on the ice that will catch the winds in fascinating ways and will at some moments look like huge flames. Windhausen is also designed to be somewhat monstrous in its final form and to move with the prevailing winds of the lake. Says Schweiger,  “I really love the drooping, supported fabrics in Dali’s paintings and I think my work may be reminiscent of that and of the dream sequence in Psycho which is my favourite Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”

Steve Sopinka, who wrote about Lake Nipissing’s ice fishing huts in On Site 21: weather, was another artist from 2010 and the creator of Out<side>in, an architectural piece that disappears in the wider landscape because it reverses the ice hut tradition of protection, opacity, and interiority to an exteriority of perception – of winter, of ice, of the huge space of a frozen lake.

Another highlight from 2010 was Barry Prophet’s “Sound Booth”, which was originally funded by the Canada Council for the Arts & the Ontario Arts Council in 2009 as an acoustic sound art generator to build capacity for Barry’s on going sound art creation. Sound Booth is an acoustic sound art generator set up on frozen Lake Nipissing in Ontario’s North Bay. Created by  composer, percussionist and sculptor Barry Prophet, the two-piece installation comprises a fishing cabin, with a long ‘resonator’ extending from one wall. A simple version of Sound Booth was created as a site specific installation at Ice Follies 2010.