David Merleau, Radio Storytelling and Hyper-Local Broadcasting, 2014

What is hyperlocal Radio? Hyperlocal Radio is an unregulated AM radio broadcast that uses a low-power transmitter. But where it lacks in power and range, it makes up radio fun because the broadcast is designed especially for you and your community.

Every year, as the ice on Lake Nipissing starts to form, a community begins to develop, as hundreds of huts are dragged out onto the ice of Callander Bay. In 2014, after being inspired by this yearly ice fishing community, David Merleau began broadcasting BigFish AM from a low-power AM transmitter outside of his fishing hut in the Callander Bay Ice Village.

Looking to the ice fishing folk of Callander Bay for stories and laughs, BigFish AM allowed you to share in the experiences of the droves of people who take to the ice every weekend of the fishing season. David Merleau brought you the stories from the lifers to the ice fishing newbies and tales from the tiny tents and the shacks that put most homes to shame! Hear about their greatest fishing moments, or their scariest time on the ice, and learn from them how to stay warm in this harsh Northern Ontario winter.

As you will hear, ice fishing is not about reeling in the big one. No, it is about a love for harsh Northern Ontario winter and the community that begins to develop the moment the ice begins to form. BigFish AM supported local businesses and also performed a public service by offering possible listeners information about healthy fishing and ice prudence.

For Ice Follies 2014, David ventured out with his portable AM radio ice hut studio to broadcast all of the fun as it happened. In addition, David also assisted Governor General Award-winner Gordon Monahan, with setting up his installation involving strung wires between a camper trailer and a piano 200 feet away.

Artist Bio:

David Merleau is a performance storyteller, radio producer and host, as well as an audio production technician. Over the years, David been quite involved in a lot of event broadcasting productions, creating and programming both online streaming and low power terrestrial radio stations involving AM and FM.

Most recently, David has been working on Forest Talk Radio, a GPS app that translates “tree talk” into English as you pass by them! His Laurier Woods edition, weaves together folktales and forest science to produce an Ol’fashion radio comedy experience delivered right to your smartphone as you walk the Orange and White trail of the Laurier Woods Conservation area in North Bay Ontario, Canada.

Image Gallery:

Bambitchell, An Objecting Odyssey, 2014

The White Water Gallery presents Bambitchell and their project “An Objective Odyssey” for Ice Follies 2014. “Look, there’s no sense pretending history is a goddamn Homeric odyssey” – Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna.

An Objective Odyssey is a site-specific installation on frozen Lake Nipissing using found objects that were historically traded across the water. Employing the style of a contemporary detective fiction, revealing mysterious clues along the way, An Objective Odyssey makes use of these objects in order to playfully interrogate the history of trade and colonization through the waterways of Northern Ontario. This project marks the beginning of a year-long process of research by Bambitchell culminating in an exhibition at White Water Gallery in North Bay.

Artist Bio:

Bambitchell is a collaboration between Toronto-based mixed media artists Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell. Their practice uses queer and feminist frameworks in order to reimagine borders, historical patterns of movement and mobility, labour, migration and memory. These frameworks, often formalized through irony and a camp aesthetic, provoke an invitation to re-think and re-form common understandings of immigration and colonial practices. Bamboat & Mitchell both have independent art practices, and program for Pleasure Dome Experimental Film & Video Collective.

Their works have been exhibited at festivals and galleries such as Mercer Union (Toronto), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlin International Film Festival, Galerie Dazibao (Montreal), and the BFI London Film Festival (UK). Their practice has been the subject of writing in ArtForum, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, and the Routledge published book “Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture”. The duo held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2016-2017), The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, USA (2018) and The Darling Foundry in Montreal, Canada (2019). Bambitchell were long list recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, through the National Gallery of Canada. They currently have a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle).

Aanmitaagzi, Dances of Resistance, 2014

Over the past three years Aanmitaagzi’s “Dances of Resistance” project has taken on hundreds of community engaged workshops and arts performances all working towards this years upcoming large scale dance theatre presentation taking place Labour Day weekend in late summer. Incorporating elements of visual and media art installation centred on the theme of Resistance, this work will be performed for the community of Nipissing First Nation, North Bay and surrounding communities. Stories embedded in residential school, racism, barriers to language and other traumatic or prohibitive experiences from individuals, communities and national identity are being explored all building towards this presentation.

Through this research and development project we aim to explore the nature of resistance including the passive and active forms of resistance that arise from a people with a shared history of trauma from the impacts of colonization and genocide. Aanmitaagzi is proud to announce the inclusion of internationally recognized artists Alejandro Ronceria and Rulan Tangen as they will be contributing to the further development of Dances of Resistance by presenting together with Aanmitaagzi at this years Ice Follies 2014 festival.

Alejandro Ronceria is an internationally acclaimed choreographer/artistic director, renown for pioneering work in indigenous dance. Trained in classical ballet he danced with companies in Colombia, The Soviet Union, USA and Canada before he began his career as a choreographer. As an artist of indigenous heritage from Colombia, he was interested in exploring his cultural identity in his art. This passion grew into an overarching focus as an artist that has spanned two decades and his achievements are prolific and groundbreaking. As well as his own artistic work, he is recognized for his significant mentorship of a new generation of indigenous dancers/choreographers in Canada, and abroad. Ronceria was one of the pioneers of dancefilm as a unique medium in Canada. In 1996, his dancefilm “A Hunter Called Memory” was an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Clermont – Ferrand and Sheffield.

Ronceria is the co-founder/founding artistic director of the first Aboriginal Dance Program in North America at The Banff Center for the Arts. The groundbreaking program brought together diverse traditional and contemporary Aboriginal/Inuit dancers from Canada, the USA, Mexico and Greenland. From 1996-2001, he served as the artistic director and developed a unique program that experimented with an indigenous approach to movement and dance performance. This program was the incubator for developing a new generation of choreographers working in Canada and abroad and served as a model for various schools for indigenous dance internationally. One of the productions from the Banff program grew into Bones: The first Aboriginal Dance Opera (2001), a collaboration with Sadie Buck and choreographed by Ronceria.

The greatest honour and culmination of Ronceria’s artistic career was to be selected to be choreographer /artistic advisor for the Official Opening Ceremony (Aboriginal segments) for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. The spectacular opening ceremony was aired on CTV and 10 other channels in a total of 11 languages with 23 million Canadian viewers. This was the most watched Canadian television event in history. In the USA, NBC reported an average of 32.6 million viewers, making it the second-most watched non-United States Winter Olympics and 3.5 billion viewers worldwide.

Rulan Tangen is an internationally accomplished dance artist and choreographer. She is the Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer DANCING EARTH , noted in Dance Magazine as “One of the Top 25 To Watch”, and winner of the National Dance Project Production and Touring Grant, as well as the National Museum of American Indian’s Expressive Arts award. She is also recipient of the Costo Medal for Education , Research and Service by UC Riverside’s Chair of Native Affairs and is a fellow of the Global Centre for Cultural Entrepreneurship, as well as honoree by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation for their first dance Fellowship, for Artistic Innovation..As performer and choreographer, she has worked in ballet, modern dance, circus, tv, film, theater , opera and Native contemporary productions in the USA, Canada, France, Norway, Mexico, Brasil and Argentina.

Her work values movement as an expression of indigenous worldview, including the honoring of matriarchal leadership, dance as functional ritual for transformation and healing, the process of decolonizing the body, and the animistic energetic connection with all forms of life on earth. She has recruited and nurtured a new generation of Indigenous contemporary dancers and holds the belief that ” to dance is to live, to live is to dance”.

Learn more about Dance of Resistance HERE

Video Gallery

Gordan Monahan, Frozen Piano on Lake Nipissing, 2014

For the Tenth Anniversary of Ice Follies, Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L) was pleased to present, in association with Nipissing University’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts, the 2013 laureate (Visual and Media Arts) of the Governor General’s Awards. Monahan’s on-ice installation was the latest in a series of installations that he has completed across Europe, America, and Asia.

His process involves the removal of the back panel of a donated piano and the attachment of 70-metre piano wires to the soundboard inside. Monahan then stretches these wires high up in the air and across to the shore. In previous cases, Monahan has attached the wires to tall buildings. For Ice Follies 2014, he will run stretch six long piano wires 70 meters across the frozen lake where he will then anchor the wires at the far end to the roof of a camper-trailer.

An amplifier inside the trailer will then send audio signals through motors into the wires, travelling along the wires and are heard coming out of the piano. The audio recordings are re-composed pieces of Frederic Chopin and Henry Cowell.

After the installation is complete, he will leave a sound-generating device that provides an ethereal and aeolian sound experience, sometimes drown out the audio signals, or otherwise blending with them when the wind blows across the wires. The whole installation is located approximately 200 meters offshore on the frozen lake.

Fellow Ice Follies 2014 artist, David Merleau assisted Monahan with setting up his installation. David Merleau also created an audio documentary allowing folks to listen to the story of the remarkable sound of Gordon Monahan’s “A Piano Listening to Itself, which you can listen to HERE

Artist Bio:

Gordon Monahan’s works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.

Beginning in the late 1970’s, he created sound works using elements of natural forces and the environment, eventually constructing long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996).

Of his work, Monahan has said, “My interest in sound originates from music because my artistic training is in traditional, classical music and pop music. In the last few years I’ve come across an interesting technical phenomenon, and that is to make motors vibrate with audio signals. The motor actually replaces the loud speaker. And I do this by sending audio signals into a large 500-watt amplifier, attaching a small electric motor to the speaker terminals at the amplifier. I’ve hung these electric motors on these long piano strings and that induces the audio signals to vibrate these long wires and you hear the audio signals coming out of the piano.”

Near North Mobile Media Lab Presents Governor General’s Awards Laureate Gordon Monahan

For the Tenth Biennial Anniversary of Ice Follies, Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L) is pleased to present, in association with Nipissing University’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts, the 2013 laureate (Visual and Media Arts) of the Governor General’s Awards. Monahan’s on-ice installation will be the latest in a series of installations that he has completed across Europe, America, and Asia. His process involves the removal of the back panel of a donated piano and the attachment of 50-metre piano wires to the soundboard inside. Monahan then stretches these wires high up in the air and across to the shore. In previous cases, Monahan has attached the wires to tall buildings. For Ice Follies 2014, he will attach the wires to the gunwales of the Chief Commanda, which is dry-docked at the government wharf in downtown North Bay. After the installation is complete, he will leave a sound-generating device that will provide an ethereal and aeolian sound experience for our visits to the vastness of frozen Lake Nipissing, from the opening reception on February 15th until mid-March.

Aside from Monahan’s installation, N2M2L will produce installations by regional contemporary-arts group, Aanmitaagzi, and a screening of performance artists from various Latin-American countries. This latter screening event will be held in N2M2L‘s 14-foot trailer, which will be parked out on the ice. This presentation is in support of the annual AluCine Latin American Film Festival in Toronto.

Gordon Monahan: 2013 Laureate, Governor General’s Awards
(Visual and Media Arts)

Gordon Monahan’s works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.

Beginning in the late 1970’s, he created sound works using elements of natural forces and the environment, eventually constructing long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996).

Of his work, Monahan has said, “My interest in sound originates from music because my artistic training is in traditional, classical music and pop music. In the last few years I’ve come across an interesting technical phenomenon, and that is to make motors vibrate with audio signals. The motor actually replaces the loud speaker. And I do this by sending audio signals into a large 500 watt amplifier, attaching a small electric motor to the speaker terminals at the amplifier. I’ve hung these electric motors on these long piano strings and that induces the audio signals to vibrate these long wires and you hear the audio signals coming out of the piano.”

Website: www.gordonmonahan.com

Further Information

Ice Follies 2014 runs from February 15^th, 2014 until mid-March. For further information about these projects or to get in touch with artists, please contact:

• Near North Mobile Media Lab at 705-476-6402
• White Water Gallery at 705-476-4222
• Aanmitaagzi at 705-474-2227

Ice Follies 2014 Dates and Times

Tentative Dates for Ice Follies 2014 have been set. Specifics about times and artists are being prepared and will be announced closer to the event launch.

Creation/Artist Days: January 25th – February 15th
Preview Sessions/Special Events: Friday, February 14th
Exhibition: February 15th – March 8th
Launch Event: Saturday, February 15th
Performance Dates: TBA (February 15th & 16th)
Ice Removal dates (before March 15th)
Catalog publishing: Fall 2014

Ice Follies 2014: Ohkwamingininiwug

“Ohkwamingininiwug” in Ojbwe means the “Ice People” and is the name for our winter programming this season as it embraces the collaborative nature of the north and the ideology behind Ice Follies 2014. This project represents the effort of several organizations coming together for one large scale site specific exhibition. Current participating organizations include: White Water Gallery, Aanmitaagzi, and Near North Mobile Media Lab all playing equal roles in making contributions, coordinating and implementing Ohkwamingininiwug.  We are the North. We work towards common goals. We are Ice People through collaboration and partnership.

Through Ice Follies, North Bay’s arts community will engage together to advance the knowledge of contemporary visual arts and address the need for an increase in the public’s understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. This collaboration will involve all contributors working together in coordinating Ice Follies. We will:

• invite artists from across Canada and Ontario to create new works for the show.
• promote the exhibition as an important Canadian northern contemporary arts event.
• ensure that artists arrive in North Bay by late January; help the artists to build their works by providing materials, ice shacks or whatever they need.
• host all events planned for Ice Follies 2014
• document the pieces and events.
• host artists discussions.
•  ensure that audiences safely experience these works.

Since Ice Follies inception there has been a steady development in functionality evolving towards a collaborative festival model. Over this time curatorial methodologies have changed from a single curator implementing the festival alone to a committee of curators collaborating on larger plans. This led to the existing practice of organizational division of tasks allowing for arts groups to identify their own plans under a theme. This ensures that the festival is conducted responsibly and that each partnering organization takes on  their own project ensuring that it is curated/coordinated effectively. It also ensures a wide range of curatorial practices will be represented independent of a single voice.

Dates and Artists will be announced shortly.