Aanmitaagzi, Serpent People (Installations and Performance), 2018

For Ice Follies 2018, Aanmitaagzi presented a series of installations from their ongoing multi-year Serpent People project, exploring the serpent tale legend of Lake Nipissing.

Grounded in historic Anishinaabe stories of the Black Sturgeon from Nipissing First Nation as told by one of Aanmitaagzi’s founding artists, Perry Mcleod-Shabogeesic, Serpent People gathers, reflects, and expresses stories and imaginings about the human condition. What are we consuming that gives us power? What are we consuming that is toxic? What has taken us away from ourselves and the essence of who we are? What would it take to transform us, and what transformations have we already undergone in our lives? Serpent People investigates these questions and explores our ability for self-reclamation and to transform for the positive.

Springing forth from the Nipissing Anishinaabe cultural mandate of a critical self, familial and nation reflection, Serpent People provides a platform to investigate what is on our hearts and minds as we prepare to continue forward. This three-year project provides an engaging, meaningful, and timely forum to investigate our past to chart our individual and collective way forward.

Learn more about Serpent People HERE

Images from Serpent People at Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2017

A Beautiful Transformation

A Beautiful Transformation examines our wants and needs through engaging with lodges, birch bark and spruce roots. A Beautiful Transformation asks ‘What are you hungry for?’ and ‘What needs or wants are you consumed by?’

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Architecture for Transformation – Tamarack Archways

Architecture for Transformation explores the architecture of historic Anishinabe places of transformation and change. The installation invites responses to ‘What is a transformation you’ve gone through?’ and ‘What is a transformation you hope to go through?’

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Feast Now, Pay Later

Through a gas station motif structure the Feast Now, Pay Later investigates consumption and needs. This multi-layered inquiry explores a number of questions: ‘What do we consume that changes the nature of who we are?’,  ‘What do we need?’ and  ‘What do we need to let go of?’

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Reaching for the Light

Reaching for the Light explores ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ within the context of both Serpents and Tipis. When have you seen yourself? When have you seen the other? What is essence of who we are? What do we want to give life to? These are some of the sources of exploration within this installation.

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Reece Terris, The Darkhouse, 2018

Presented by White Water Gallery

Reece Terris, as a visiting settler (based in Vancouver), will respond to urban waste by creating a large-scale structure that will literally melt away. He will create a 20’ diameter dome-shaped structure out of ice and snow, with a large circular hole cut through the ice at its centre. “The Darkhouse” draws its name from ice fishing huts used by spear fishers, in whose darkness one’s eyes become sensitive to the ambient natural light bouncing off the lake floor, transforming the ice fishing hole into a screen of sorts where targets become visible. Upon entering Terris’ hut, audience members may seek targets (even if ‘only’ visual ones) as the lake bottom first comes into view, but this tendency will be worn down by the relative stillness of the lake. Sitting in quiet reflection, in a circular space, audiences will become attentive to subtle shifts of the lake, thereby learning to listen and see otherwise.

Artist Bio:

Reece Terris is a Vancouver based artist whose work alters the expected experiential qualities of a place or object through an amplification or shift in the primary function of an original design.

Past projects include a six-storey apartment building temporarily installed in the rotunda of the Vancouver Art Gallery, a pedestrian wooden bridge connecting two residential homes, and an architectural false front added to the existing false front of an artist-run centre.

His practice is manifest through a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, installation, and photography. Quite often through their hybrid execution, he complicates the traditional definitions of each of these.

Aylan Couchie, Now is the time to see the Truth, 2018

Presented by White Water Gallery

As longtime cohabitants, the residents of North Bay and Nipissing First Nation have had a relationship that has been, at times, contentious with respect to the health their shared waterway, Lake Nipissing. A seemingly never-ending conflict over the declining population of pickerel finds many area residents and businesses blaming the Anishinaabeg for netting. At the same time, there exists an unacknowledged history of settlers who have, themselves, overfished these waters in the past and continue to take from Nbisiing, both in summer and winter, with hundreds of ice huts dotting the frozen landscape. This work looks to acknowledge this ongoing tension, while at the same time serve as a reminder that we are all responsible for the health of our shared resources. We live in precarious times of changing climate and destructive pollution of our waterways and in the end, we are all stewards of these lands. Ni waamjigaadeg debwewin.

Artist Bio

Aylan Couchie is a multidisciplinary Anishinaabe artist and writer hailing from Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario. Though now based in Toronto, she received her BFA with a major in sculpture from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is currently an MFA Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Media Art and Design program at OCAD University where she is pursuing her graduate studies with a focus on Indigenous monument and public art. Her work explores ideas of colonialism, land and First Nation realities and histories from her Two-Spirit, feminist perspective. She’s been the recipient of several awards including “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture” through the International Sculpture Center and the Inaugural Barbara Laronde Award from Native Women in the Arts. Most recently, Aylan won a Premier’s Award through Ontario Colleges and in 2017 will see her largest public art piece yet, raised 70 feet to overlook the City of Barrie.

Melanie Alkins, She Spoke Peace, 2018

Spoke Peace is an installation that is intended to be interactive and to inspire participants to stop, reflect, set an intention and collaborate in creating the momentum for using peace and positive intentions to shape our future.

Eric Robillard, Infinite Patterns, 2018

An interactive piece using mirrors that are facing each other in triangular shape, creating a kaleidoscope effect when the observer peaks inside. This installation exists on different levels, and patterns can gradually be added as the observers and the artists explore different ways to play with the reflections.

Artist Bio:

Eric Robillard is a filmmaker born in 1988 in Sudbury, Ontario. Growing up bilingual in a small town outside of Sudbury, he often dreamt of seeing the world. Having had a passion for world history since a young age, Eric enrolled at Laurentian University in Sudbury, with a major in History. He graduated film school in 2018, and has since been working steady within the film & television industry in both Northern Ontario and Toronto. Furthermore, two of the five short films he wrote and directed during his studies have gone to become official selections at various festivals in Canada, and internationally. Eric has recently been nominated for Best Director at the NOMFA (Northern Ontario Music and Film Awards) for the short film he wrote POST SCRIPT, one of three major projects created by his graduating class. The film is also in nomination for Best Short at NOMFA.

Andrew Ackerman & Chris Kosloski, Embodied Terrains, 2018

Presented by Near North Mobile Media Lab

Embodied Terrains is a site-specific installation by local artists Chris Kosloski and Andrew Ackerman consisting of two fifteen-foot long tunnels fabricated from repurposed metal drums, within which are housed two synchronized video projections

The two-channel video is also looped to provide a cyclical rather than non-linear reading of the work, with the aim of eliminating any sense of a definitive ‘beginning’ or ‘end’. This strategy serves to dissolve boundaries and evokes a sense of timelessness. In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Emmanuel Kant suggests that “the Beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists of having boundaries”, whereas “the Sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, boundlessness is represented.” In this respect, the video projection explores this notion of the Sublime. The sculptural apparatus housing the projections serve as a ‘threshold’, positioning viewers on the margins of disparate yet related representations of a particular place, in this case, the shores of Lake Nipissing. Viewers of the work are situated in the present while simultaneously consuming visual representations of the same subject in a past and/or future state. The work evokes a sense of ‘totality’, or more specifically, a conception of place as both specific and limitless.

Artist Bio:

Andrew Ackerman holds a BFA from York University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He has a background in a broad range of sculptural processes and has experience working in a professional sculpture foundry, where he was involved in the creation, conservation, and restoration of large-scale public sculpture. His own practice combines media such as bronze, wax, gypsum, resin, paint, and sound installation. His work has been exhibited in venues such as Leigh Wen Fine Art (New York), and The Phoenix Center for the Arts, and he has also executed public and private commissions.

Chris Kosloski is a video artist, college professor and filmmaker. A graduate of the Confederation College film program in Thunder Bay, Ontario (1996), he has worked in the film industry for over 12 years as a technician and editor and is now a professor of Digital Cinematography at Canadore College in North Bay. Chris has exhibited a number video art and projection pieces including; “Your Sadness Means Everything to Us” at the Definitely Superior Art Gallery Juried Show 2008, “All Diesels are Turbo” was featured on the video art blog Niche LA in 2013. “Lyceum Projection” was a large scale projection mapping project which Chris co-created for the City of Thunder Bay in 2014. Chris was named a finalist for the 2016 KM Hunter Artist Award. “Proxyscope”, a multi-channel projection/sculpture was featured at the 2017 Bay Street Film Festival. His latest media art installation, “Embodied Terrains,” was a collaboration with visual artist and sculptor Andrew Ackerman for the 2018 Ice Follies exhibit in North Bay — a biennial festival of contemporary and community art on lake Nipissing.

Drew Gauley, Frozen Messages For Nipissing, 2018

Presented by Nipissing Regional Curatorial Collective

In 2017 Drew Gauley was contracted as a Drone Pilot by Tank Media out of Montreal to create a piece for Heritage Canada’s 150th collection. The result of this project was Drew Gauley’s Frozen Messages, capturing the beauty of a community coming together on a cold Winter’s day in Lake Temiskaming to capture Drew Gauley’s vision for Canada 150.

Frozen Messages is a project that involved the creation of a giant snow drawing on Lake Temiskaming, the interpretation of the project themes by local high school students with an exhibition of their artworks at the Temiskaming Art Gallery and a short film created by Drew Gauley.

For Ice Follies 2018, Drew Gauley continued with the themes from Frozen Messages he offered to Temiskaming in 2017, penning his mark in the snow via snowblower to reveal Frozen Messages for Nipissing. Drew contributed to Ice Follies by creating a community focused piece where volunteers can carve messages into the ice that can literally be seen from space.

Artist Bio

Drew Gauley is a full-time filmmaker and media artist residing in beautiful Temiskaming Shores in Northern Ontario. In addition to providing commercial video services through his company Good Gauley Productions, Drew produces collaborative arts projects, documentary films and offers media instruction. Having grown up in the suburbs of the GTA, before living in downtown Toronto while working at the ROM for over 10 years, he is happy to announce that he now considers himself to be a true northerner!

Driven by a guiding belief in the societal benefits associated with arts related pursuits, Drew is active on many boards and works tirelessly to support and promote arts, culture, and heritage. He is a valuable member of the 2018 SPARC Symposium working group, providing his expertise towards all things related to video engagement, event support, and long-term documentation. He believes that the work of the SPARC organization, and in particular, the 2018 Symposium in Cobalt, will bring about positive change to support arts, culture and heritage in rural Ontario.

Wolfgang Belanger, Ice Ollies, 2018

A new twist for Ice Follies 2018, Ice Ollies, is a snow skate park filled with jumps, a box and awesome ramps where young people used snow piles to perform tricks on snowskates. Through out the event, Ice Ollies had a crew of skate and snowboarders getting maximum air while checking out the scenery.

“It’s nice to have a little home away from home, because we don’t have the skate park in the winter. We’re using what’s called a snowskate. They’re a brand new thing made by Ambition, and it gives us something to do in the winter when we don’t have our normal skates or whatever we do, and it keeps us entertained for sure,” said Andrew Belanger.

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More info coming soon…