Lise Beaudry, Video Ice Hut #1, 2006

Materials: Borrowed ice hut, video monitor, DVD player, colored pencils, and furniture

Lise Beaudry repurposed an existing and functional ice hut to house an audiovisual display documenting her own experience of ice fishing with her family. The work included a small bare monitor that the artist mounted onto the unadorned plywood interior of the hut. The monitor displayed a continuous loop showing the typical ice fishing scene of her family with a soundtrack of them in casual friendly conversation. The audio was available in both French and English according to the speaker’s mother tongue and it showed how the sport of ice-fishing is different in different communities.

Working together, the three components: the video, the audio installation, and the ice hut, addressed the modes of social behavior and everyday experience that are informed by particular Canadian cultural contexts and geography. The piece encouraged feedback and visitors were invited to write down their own experiences,  posting them along the walls of the hut as a communal gesture.

Artist Bio:

Lise Beaudry, originally from Earlton, a rural Francophone community in Northern Ontario, lived in Toronto where during the time of Ice Follies where she was completing her MFA at York University. Her photographic work has been exhibited in several Canadian cities, the U.S, Romania, and Arles, France during Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie. In 2002, her first video: Le TOURBILLON won her Best Upcoming Toronto Video/Filmmaker at the INSIDE OUT FILM FESTIVAL as well as the Audience Award at the Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. This short has now toured to 26 festivals in Canada, the US, and Europe. In 2003, she co-founded AlleryJaunt – local art in local garages – a Toronto alternative annual art event transforming the back alley garages surrounding Trinity Bellwoods Park into venues that showcase visual art, installations, performance, and film & video.

FASTWÜRMS, Ice Station Isis, 2006

Materials: HD video, various installation components, donated ice hut

For FASTWÜRMS Ice Follies project, the collective transformed their fishing hut into an esoteric set for their new occult adventure film entitled “Ice Station Isis”, inspired by the 1968 cold war thriller Ice Station Zebra.

The ice fishing hut and was used as the setting for a fictional low-tech secret headquarters run by cold war Witches and a team of young interns working on mysterious experiments with rockets, neurochemistry, and submarine communications, complete with flares, plastic snow gear, rockets, sex toys, obsolete mobile phones, and a custom satellite dish. Typically over the top, not surprisingly their approach fit right in.

FASTWÜRMS’ appeal had always been predicated on their appropriation of the rural as part of their creative lexicon; an outsider territory for their psychic explorations. Ice Station Isis celebrated their obvious affection.

The collective worked with local artists and students to film portions of ‘“Ice Station Isis” here in North Bay, with their ultra-modern hut doubled as both prop and dressing room for cast and crew.

Artist Bio:

FASTWÜRMS is the name of the collaboration and joint authorship of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse. Working together as multidisciplinary and installation artists for over 26 years, FASTWÜRMS has an extensive international and national exhibition history. FASTWÜRMS is famous for creating complex narratives that use craft, performance, cinema, relational aesthetics, and event architecture, to build unique artworks. This very well-known collaborative team is at present working with art students at the University of Guelph.

Simon Frank, Hut, 2006

Materials: Borrowed ice hut, cedar branches, spikes, and snow

For his Ice Folly, Simon Frank constructed his shelter out of both natural and man-made materials. Using the remains of a fishing hut as a substructure, the artists created a hybrid igloo using cedar branches and piled snow. Only accessible via a ladder at the top of the structure, as you descended the small of free cedar boughs proved enchanting and the interior turned out to be unexpectedly warm and lodge-like. Sitting inside, a was reminded of exhilarating hours spent making snow forests as a child. The smell of the interior also had a meditative effect that reminded me of indigenous traditions. Like most of Frank’s work, his hut incorporated neural elements and was respectful to its native environment.

About his Ice Follies project, Frank said: “I really want to work with cedar trees – the kind mass harvested for the production of farm posts. I like working with trees that I don’t actually cut down myself for the purpose of art-making and the trees cut got fences are perfect – I would like to use the trees in their raw state before they are defoliated and de-branched… I am also extremely interested in using water and ice to make a work –  essentially cutting a hole in the ice and pumping up water to spray on a hut – to encase it in think diamond light refracting droplets of ice – perhaps over armature forms attached to an ice hut”

Artist Bio:

Simon Frank is a Hamilton-based environmental artist that began his artistic career as a poet. Simon now works across the country on installations and artworks that include natural or organic elements and that always contain direct references to our boreal consciousness, our connections to the forests we live in. Frank was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and now lives and works in Hamilton, ON. Frank’s sculptural work utilizes natural materials culled from numerous hikes and excursions around his home. The forms he makes with these materials immediately reference architecture, furniture, art, and those things which relate to the ritual of everyday human life. He has exhibited at the Deleon White Gallery (Toronto), the Niagara Artist’s Co (St. Catherines), the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Forest City Gallery (London).

Lori Grace Johnson, Meander, 2006

Materials: Plywood, wood, ice, wire, fabric

For Ice Follies 2006,  Lori Grace Johnson created Meander a work that fused remnants from our Post-industrial civilization with the natural elements: ice and water. Johnson then housed this frozen remnant in a roughly pyramid-shaped plywood sculpture. From a distance, this structure echoed a distant cupola on the Pro-Cathedral. The reference seemed to be that there was this stone tower after our civilization had fused once again.

While all the 2004 structures were moved onto the site as completed things, in 2006 Lori Grace Johnson built Meander from scratch out on the lake, hauling out (by hand) large wooden prefab panels that she erected into a tall, four-sided pyramidal lean—to both the elements and the work’s visitors in the centre of which she placed a long, vertical column of ice with a passing resemblance to a core sample drilled from the frozen lake surface. Echoing the labors (and possible intentions) of, say, the builders of a structure like Stonehenge, who hauled its massive stones across great distances to the Salisbury Plain for purposes as yer still undivided, Johnson’s work cleaved closer to the sacred end of the spectrum rather than the profane.

Artist Bio:

Lori Grace Johnson is a sculptor and visual artist based in North Bay, where she has been represented by Joan Ferneyhough Gallery for seven years. While maintaining a studio practice, Lori has studied Art History & Culture at McGill University in Montreal, PQ graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1992. In 2001, she received the Emerging Visual Artist Award from the Ontario Arts Council.

Past involvements include “The Autoshow”, a group exhibition along with Dermot Wilson and David Carlin, scheduled for the Whitby’s Station Gallery in 2008, and Georgian College in 2009. In 2007 the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Virtual Museum of Canada presented Lori’s work in “A Retrospective of Artists in North Bay and Surrounding Areas”.

Lori’s art originates in uncalculated impressions of life encounters, dream content, and unbidden image. She operates from the belief that healthy culture is generated by elements of the creative force. The importance of bringing meaning to the third dimension is obtained by deeper connotations from the fifth. And through the tandem operation of technical skill and intellect, Lori’s process of ideation in the discovery and presentation of sculptural form is achieved.

Frank Kools, Legacy, 2006

Materials: Purpose-built ice hut, core-last, wood, flags, Plexiglas, and Styrofoam

Frank Kools created an “Ice Carousel” for Ice Follies, 2006. This working kid’s carousel featured fish-shaped windows, flags, ornaments, and a beautifully painted ceiling inside. Once the “rider” went inside the hut, the “cranker” turned a wooden handle to start the carousel rotating gently. The piece echoes two conventional carousels that mark the North Bay waterfront in the summertime.

Artist Bio:

Frank Kools is a mechanic/engineer/inventor who has not shown his work in an art gallery before Ice Follies, 2006. Married to Lee Kools, marketing manager for the Capitol Centre in North Bay, and living in Callander with his two children, Frank has owned his own automobile repair shop in North Bay for many years and has recently sold the business to go into private contracting. Frank has also worked for many years on theatrical sets and props for Toros Theatre company and many others. He also taught the robotics team at Chippewa High School for many years and helped them to build their award-winning robotics.

Frank Shebageget, Indian House, 2006

Materials: Purpose-built ice hut, plywood, wood, and Plexiglas

Frank Shebageget constructed a scale model of this childhood home that was reminiscent of a miniaturized house. Originally from Northwestern Ontario, Shebageget is of Ojibway descent and the home he was raised in was built according to blueprints devised by the Department of Indian and Northern affairs.

Shebageget’s rebuilding of the same house – an earlier work titled “Small Village” included a series of architectural models – returns the structure back to bare essentials; a plywood shell stripped of all adornment and individuality. Painted a deep red, his ice hut reduced the popular North American ideal of ‘home’ to its most fundamental material components.

People may consider it just an Indian house on a reserve, but it also resembles a miner’s home, a house in a forestry town, or a post-war home in an urban centre. The residential home was based on a standard design that was both utilitarian and cost-effective. In the artist’s words: “ I would like to build an Indian house, a “reserve” house, approximately 8×10 or 10×12, a very simple structure, and paint it red.”

Artist Bio:

Frank Shebageget was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in 1972 and currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Shebageget is of Ojibway heritage. Shebageget’s installations incorporate wood, metal, cement, and hardware materials. Frank Shebageget’s work is in the collections of the Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa; Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa; Dorothy Hoover Library, Ontario College of Art, Toronto; and the Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, Toronto. This First Nations installation and sculptural artist has also worked in artist-run galleries in Ottawa as a curator and arts administrator.

Peter Von Tiesenhausen, Drift, 2006

Materials: Snow

Peter Von Tiesenhausen’s project evokes the majesty and violent perfection of the natural world and its rhythms. He is interested in investing contemporary existence with a more profound connection to the radiant of nature in a manner that is neither pure ecology nor distanced irony.

Although Von Tiesenhausen planned on using chainsaws and other ice carving tools to build a structure out of ice either below the surface, above, or both depending on the thickness of the ice. He decided to work with the materials that were presented to him by the site. After ten days of blizzards have covered the lake in meters of snow and after a particularly portentous snowy owl sighting, Von Tiesenhausen decided to work with the snow to create his Ice Follies.

Artist Bio:

Peter Von Tiesenhausen is a Canadian artist living in rural northeastern Alberta. He attended Alberta College of Art briefly in 1979 and 1981 and has been a full-time practicing visual artist since 1990. He has exhibited and lectured widely across Canada as well as in Europe and the United States. The land on which he lives constitutes his primary and ongoing artwork and in 1995 he claimed copywriter over that land. He has been successful on several occasions defending his artwork against the incursions of other corporate interests. His practice includes painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, event, video, and on occasion, performance.