News

2008

Jeannie Thib, Cache, 2008

Jeannie Thib, Cache: 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.

Peter Nickle, Ice Cracks, 2008

Ice Cracks by Peter Nickle is a sound art installation is that operated from a small recreational vehicle parked adjacent to the lake. Inside the vehicle North Bay artist, Peter Nickle assembled the audio recording gear he needed to record, amplify in playback the sound of the ice. These groans and cracks were recorded by three microphones that Nickle planted directly into the ice for the duration of the show.

Donald Lawrence, One Eye Folly, 2008

The One Eye Folly by Donald Lawrence is a camera obscura that was constructed on top of a small rowboat. The work is configured as a piece of microarchitecture that is a hybrid form between a boat and a shed; the premise of ice follies (created by Dermot Wilson) being to create something inspired by the notion of an ice-fishing hut.

Nicole Dextras, Resource, 2008

Resource was a new structural installation work by environmental artist Nicole Dextras from Vancouver, made of tower ice letters that melted and morphed with Lake Nipissings elements. The lake and the water labeled as a singular business term did raise valid and present questions regarding our environment, the most pressing concern of Canadians before the economic bubble burst, and our societys history of exploiting all natural resources available. During the installation process, Dextras further pointed out issues of ownership of water from a political perspective in local, national, and international terms, particularly with the polar ice melting and our environment drastically changing.

Christine Charette and Jeremy Bean, Rewind in Fast Forward, 2008

The ice hut Christine Charette and Jeremy Bean created for the Ice Follies 2008 Biennial consisted of a wooden representation of a crystalline mound, a pod frozen in time, and a figure in silhouette. Inside, the structure explores found mini-exhibits sealed in niches and creches myth, historical artifacts, and the wonder of discovery. The display cubes are packed with relics from different eras, remarkable objects, without rhyme or reason, a sort of collection trying to make sense of earth’s human and imagined past.