Aanmitaagzi, Mkomiwii: (Turns to Ice) Installations and Performance, 2020

Aanmitaagzi has presented as part of the Ice Follies festival as a presenter and co-producer for the past 5 festivals. For Ice Follies 2020, Aanmitaagzi presented works developed through their Where Does Art Begin? project. This included several installations on the lake and a performance, which took place on February 22, 2020.

Where Does Art Begin? is an cross-sectoral inter-arts project of gathering, dreaming and making, providing an opportunity for exploration and transformation through customary harvesting practices, art-making and dance theatre. On Saturday, February 22nd at 7pm, Aanmitaagzi conducted their major performance on Lake Nipissing.

We are at a very exciting time when many indigenous artists, knowledge keepers and communities are redefining who we are and how we organize ourselves. We are moving away from traditional Canadian models of organization in arts, culture, heritage to reconnecting our contemporary ways of being to our historic frameworks. What’s in our bundles? When do our gifts move together simultaneously and when does one stop and the other continue? What do we risk losing when we operate alone? This project will provide an opportunity for us to trace the roots of transformation, dreaming and making.

Within the Nipissing First Nation arts and cultural milieu, we have been inspired to commit more vigorously to each other and our respective practices, our relation to our natural world and our future. We believe that gathering together our artistic and cultural resource leaders is critical in providing our contemporary art makers with forums to engage with our indigenous holistic approaches. Where Does Art Begin? creates an engaging, meaningful and timely forum to investigate where our work intersects, and departs.

Installation Gallery

Aanmitaagzi open studio art making for Ice Follies 2020

In the weeks following the opening reception, Aanmitaagzi hosted a variety of events including, paper lantern building and freeze frame making workshops and performances by members of Aanmitaagzi. All contributions were then installed as part of the festival.

Mkomiiwi: (Turns to Ice) Performance

In the weeks following the opening reception, Aanmitaagzi hosted a variety of events including, paper lantern building and freeze frame making workshops and performances by members of Aanmitaagzi. All contributions were then installed as part of the festival.

Creators / Performers

Sid Bobb*
Miigwan Buswa*
Penny Couchie*(Choreographer)
Christine Friday
Daniel Lomas
JP Longboat
Meagan Lozicki Paulin
Tasheena Sarazin*(Costumes)
Tijana Spasic
Imelda Villalon

Installation Artists *

Animikiikwe Couchie-Waukey
Chris Couchie
Dan & Eva Couchie
Daniel Couchie
Sherry Guppy
Karis Jones-Pard
Ange Loft
Donald Sutherland
Cultural Consultants
Dan & Eva Couchie
Carol Guppy

Performance Gallery

Studio Nude Beach: Hannah Smith, Allison Roberts, Eric Robillard and Benjamin Hermann, Tetra, 2020

TETRA is a 12′ x 12’ tetrahedron constructed of metal, wood, acrylic two way mirrors and a rear projection screen. At night abstract psychedelic videos made by Studio Nude Beach are projected onto the screen and snow creating an immersive kaleidoscopic effect on the inside. The full visual impact is collectively experienced by participants seated inside the structure. In the summer the floor of the structure is covered in foam and astroturf, and furnished with oversized fuzzy pillows to encourage people to comfortably share space while experiencing dynamic effects of the kaleidoscope. For the winter version of this installation the inside and main structure was sculpted out of snow. The 10 foot hut is a winter version of an exhibit originally installed at River & Sky Music Festival in Field Ontario, Bay Block Party in North Bay, Ontario.

“We’re going to project some images and some video and it becomes a bright kaleidoscope inside,” explained Smith as she worked on finishing the interior during an interview with BayToday. “We just wanted to make a really big piece, something psychedelic that people could crawl into and kind of overcome by but not overwhelmed,” added Roberts.

Besides Smith and Roberts, friends Eric Robillard and Ben Hermann also pitched in. “Eric has done installation pieces that are also kaleidoscopes so we all took bits we were interested in and just blew it up and made it a huge amazing project.”

Artist Bio

Studio Nude Beach is an emerging artist collective based in North Bay, Ontario. We explore psychedelic and abstract sensory sanctuaries that enrich the experience of public spaces and events. Our work is a prompt to share space, interact and have a collective experience. All four members of Studio Nude Beach have diverse backgrounds in experimental art, film making, spatial design and building practice.

Megan Feheley, Jenna Dawn Maclellan, Christine Negus, Emily Pelstring & Jon Sasaki, Pressure Cracks, 2020

Pressure Cracks are caused by fluctuations and instabilities; in the heat of the day, the ice expands and, in cases of rapid transitions to the cold of night, the ice contracts, ruptures, and splinters violently. These ruptures exist as harbingers of environmental instability that prompt us to be more attentive to our actions, as well as to the world around us. Relatedly, this multimedia exhibition considers sites of vulnerability not only within physical environments, but within our contemporary social and political structures as well. Pressure Cracks asks: when do we falsely assume security, and what are the risks of these assumptions? What is fleeting, and what can we trust to endure?

Pressure Cracks lures viewers onto the ice with a familiar northern scene — an ice-fishing shack accompanied by a snowmobile, preparations for a campfire, and an industrial tarp — only to reveal that this scene is actually one made of fantasy and artifice. Rather than steel and rugged wood, the snowmobile and logs are soft-sculpture works delicately stuffed and sewn with brightly coloured textiles by Jenna Dawn Maclellan. Moreover, the neighbouring industrial tarp is revealed to have fine, thoughtful cut-outs. Through a process akin to birch bark biting (an Indigenous mark-making practice using thin sheets of folded birch bark which are then bitten to make designs), Megan Feheley’s brilliant orange mola: consent tarp uses tarpaulin to index and transfer knowledge visually in a world that may one-day be without birch bark.

Inside the ice-fishing shack, visitors are confronted with Emily Pelstring’s ghostly animations, which appear to emerge out of cracks in the shack itself, while two videos play on loop: Jon Sasaki’s Pictures of the Floating World follows a bouncy castle cast adrift on a lake, kept afloat only by a small, gas-powered generator. Christine Negus’s our home watches a tiny wooden cabin catch fire while two ghosts look on. As one ghost smiles, the other frowns — a visual representation of the range of possible responses to the destruction of the world as we know it.

Megan Feheley, Mola: Consent Tarp

In this work, designs based on birch bark biting (an Indigenous mark-making practice using thin sheets of birch, folded and bitten into to make designs) as well as words in Cree language are cut out of orange tarpaulin. mola or __ means no in ililimowin, the dialect of Cree my family speaks. Creating the birch bark biting-like designs in the tarpaulin investigates tarpaulin as a mode of transferring knowledge visually in a world without birch bark, a growing anxiety and possibility with impending climate catastrophe.

In mola, the permanence of plastic is something considered to stand in duality: it is a product of an extractivist industry that has been weaponized against Indigenous bodies and land, is inescapable in this day and age; but it is also something that is utilitarian, recyclable, inexpensive and could survive impending climate events where birch bark may be scarce, entirely extinct, or in other ways unavailable. My understanding of ililiw/Cree visual culture is that objects and belongings have a certain lifespan and weren’t intended to last forever: it is a vital function for things to be remade and retold so that the teachings they hold can be recontextualized for another generation. Colonization has violently interrupted this mode of production through apocalyptic events that Indigenous peoples have (and haven’t) survived, and my concern is about any future events caused by climate change could jeopardize our knowledge of production and transmission further. Although in a heartbreaking double bind, mola considers how to create things that could potentially withstand generational gaps in production. The permanence of plastic is evidence of this anxiety – what if someone isn’t there to pass knowledge inherent ways of making along and ensure that things are remade and transferred? Even in futile attempts. how can I protect what I have to say to the future? I want future generations to understand that their boundaries deserve respect – boundaries on their bodies, lands, languages, loves. I want this regardless of past, present and impending apocalypses. I want out future generations to know how to say no.

Artist Bio:

Megan Feheley is a two spirit ililiw (Moose Cree) interdisciplinary artist and curator living and working out of Toronto. They are currently working towards their BFA in Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University, and work predominately in sculpture/installation, beadwork, textiles, painting and video. Megan is passionate about resurgent practices, language revitalization, working with materials that connect them to their homeland, and exploring Indigenous and queer futurity.

Jenna Dawn Maclellan, Le Homecoming, 2017

This series of textile works by Jenna Dawn Maclellan is inspired by the artist’s return to Northern Ontario’s rural regions after having spent several years in Montreal. Confronted with the challenges posed by this vast expanse of boreal frost, she formulates a variety of playful strategies to navigate the North anew. With her snowmobile, chain saw, and logs – all sewn – Jenna Dawn Maclellan pays homage to the North of her childhood. The objects sewn by Maclellan are as familiar as they are fantastic. Being transposed into textile gives an air of storied marvelousness to their otherwise ordinary nature. This is how objects found in so many Northern Ontario sheds and garages are transformed into genuine icons of northernness.

Artist Bio:

Jenna Dawn Maclellan, artist – bilingual cultural mediator – educator, was born in the prairies, raised in the northern Ontario community of Sioux Lookout and has lived and worked in Montreal and Sudbury before installing in Ottawa. Location, accessibility and personal encounters have greatly influenced her socially-engaged practice, where she activates memory and site through performative gestures in public and private spaces inspired by the everyday. She is a story-maker, a builder of social sculptures, a guardian of memories, a social activator and a transmitter of lost skills. Moreover, Maclellan uses her unique life-experiences to inform her artistic practice as a way of sharing joy with others. Specifically, the works of Le Homecoming are meant to be playful and interactive, as maclellan questions her own ability to return north to the land of her childhood. In this way, she re-invents creative survival strategies for a young woman use in order to survive the harsh climate of her beloved Northern Ontario landscape. Maclellan has an MFA in Fibre and Material Practices. Through her non-linear journey on four continents, she has been influenced by her ability to see the world through the eyes of others. In this process, Maclellan has created collaborative community-based projects and exhibited in public spaces, galleries, museums and festivals in Canada and internationally including Le Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec, Diagonale, MAI, The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Toronto Free Gallery, The Thunder Bay Art Gallery, La Casa de la Culture in Hulguin Cuba, El Museo Textil de Oaxaca in Mexico, La Galerie de Nouvel-Ontario, La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery and in partnership with the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.

Christine Negus, Our Home, 2013

A miniature model of a cabin is set aflame, while a droning version of Loretta Lynn’s “This Haunted House” rings out, as two ghoulish tree protectors stare on, in horror and delight.

Artist Bio:

Christine Negus is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work addresses the fallacy of resilience and progress, and the redemptive potential of feminist violence and humor, culminating in a practice filled with lacerating works that reflect on memory, alienation, anxiety, and trauma. Negus obtained her MFA from Northwestern University in 2010 and her BFA from Western University in 2008. Some of her notable exhibitions include: the8fest, CROSSROADS, Tangled Art Gallery, MIX NYC, Dunlop Gallery, Queer City Cinema, AKA artist run, Artists’ Television Access, Milwuakee Underground Film Festival, Museum London, Media City Film Festival, Art Gallery of York University, Swedish Film Institute, and Kasseler Dokfest. She has had solo exhibitions and screenings at RPL Theatre, Forest City Gallery, Gallery TPW, gallerywest, Julius Ceasar, The Pitch Project, and Modern Fuel. Negus has upcoming solo exhibitions at Land Line Chicago, YYZ, and Artcite Windsor. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail and Modern Painters and an interview on Negus’ practice appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of BlackFlash magazine. Negus received the National Film Board of Canada;s Best Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award through Images Festival 2008.

Emily Pelstring, The Haunting Blob, 2017-2020

Pelstring’s The Haunted Blob is a projected animation of A ghostly dance sequence. The dance also appears in her film Witch’s Work, where it represents a chrysalis like “blob” phase in a character’s life, post-birth and just before she transforms into a snake. The moment is typically places inside the gallery’s walls as a colourful, entertaining spectacle and as a fragment of a story embedded in architecture. In its Pressure Cracks iteration, the “blob” takes up a ghostly residence in the ice shack glimpsed through a cartoon shack.

Get an HD view of The Haunting Blob HERE

Artist Bio

Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker based in Canada. She is a full-time faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University, and her creative work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her films, performances and installations have been shown internationally in galleries and festivals. In her single-channel animations, she experiments with optical filtering and textural effects by processing images through analog video effects units, as well as weirder and more convoluted means of image manipulation. Her installations have employed holography, stereography, animated Peppers Ghost displays, and projection-mapped video, in conjunction with built material elements. These pieces reference magic shows and the occult, and draw links between spirituality, wonder, and illusion. Emily also has a longstanding investment in the creative strategies of feminist media art, particularly practices of reclaimative myth-making, collaboration, collectively, speculative futurisms, and camp aesthetics. These interests have led her to build collaboratively-produced bodies of work under two collective monikers: Inflatable Deities, an artistic duo with Jessica Mensch; and The Powers, a music performance and video collaboration with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline.

Jon Sasaki, Pictures of the Floating World, 2017

Entirely self-contained, an inflatable castle is adrift on a body of water. An orange blower keeps the castle afloat, and a gas-powered generator keeps the fan running. If the generator or blower fail for whatever reason, the castle will sink in a matter of seconds taking the AC blower, generator, camera and videographer down with it.

Artist Bio:

Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice brings performance, video, object and installation into a framework where expectation and out rarely align. Often charting territory between logic and absurdity, his work employs ad hoc problem solving and inefficiencies in thought experiments that search for useful models. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Ottawa Art Gallery, (Ottawa, ON); the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, (Lethbridge, AB); the Art Gallery of Ontario. Sasaki has participated in recent group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, (Seoul, South Korea,) The Bentway, (Toronto); The Canadian Embassy in Japan (Tokyo); and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto, ON). He has presented performance and intervention projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, the Gardiner Museum and the Varley art Gallery. He was the recipient of the 2015 Canadian Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Prize (Dufftown, Scotland.) Saski holds a BFA from Mount Allison University (Sackville, NB) and is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto.

Curated by Minor Hockey Curatorial

Presented by the Near North Mobile Media Lab

Minor Hockey Curatorial is a joint collaboration between North Bay-based curator Robin Alex McDonald and Toronto-based New Liskeard native Alexander Rondeau. Formed in January 2019, Minor Hockey uses curation as a means of bringing objects and people into critical dialogue with one another. Their first exhibition, ‘Above the Belt, Below the Bush’ explored the extra/ordinary fusion of queer glamour and rural northern aesthetics through works by Adrienne Crossman, Danya Danger, Tyler Matheson, Dominic Pinney, Walter K. Scott, and Jordyn Stewart.

Robin Alex McDonald is an arts writer, academic, and independent curator currently living and working on Robertson Huron Treaty territory and the traditional territories or Nipissing First Nation. Robin is a sessional faculty member at Nipissing University and OCAD University, as well as a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University. Their published work can be found in several magazines and journals, including n.paradoxa, nomorepotlucks, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and Literature and Medicine

Alexander Rondeau is a queer, Francophone curator and interdisciplinary artist from rural Northeastern Ontario. Currently, Rondeau is an OGS-funded first year MFA Graduate in the Criticism and Curatorial Practice graduate program at OCAD University. Rondeau also holds a BFA in Image Arts: Photography Studies from Ryerson University. His curatorial practice is interested in making exhibitions in public spaces such as beaches, hiking trails, and downtown streets with QT2S artists in curatorial projects, he has curated exhibitions for artist-run centres such as the White Water Gallery (following a curatorial residency in the summer of 2019) and the Near North Mobile Media Lab.

Destiny Swiderski, Refract : REFLECT, 2020

Presented by White Water Gallery

Refract : REFLECT is an experiential installation of architecture, local Indigenous narratives, and the natural elements of light, sound, ice and snow. As ice turns back into water, the tectonic ice plates collide to create a geometry of form, light and shadow; creating an intimate gathering space for viewers to contemplate, interact and meet. Deeply rooted within its context, the natural phenomena of the ice jamming effect is shaped by shards reaching out of the lake by the seemingly forces of nature, while providing sight lines to the nearby Manitou Islands, Nipissing First Nation and the downtown of North Bay.

Community collaboration is celebrated as local knowledge holder, Carol Guppy and Artist Amanda Bellefeuille from Nipissing First Nation share their stories of the significance of the bear, moon cycle and its relationship to this territory. Generated from Amanda’s beadwork, the projected images were fabricated and installed by local community members and artists. The ever-changing filtered winter light penetrates through the perforated holes, creating a cinematic shadow dance of these stories into the vibrant interior of each structure.

As natural acoustics from the wind and voices can be heard through the shelter, viewers are encouraged to stand, sit, crawl and lie down to get the full embodied experience of space and time. At night, the installation transforms into a beacon of refracted light as the vibrant interior provides a sense of warmth, evoking memory, while absorbing the hues of the sunset. Winter is a special time to reflect, gather, and share stories of where we live, who we are and how we are all connected to the land.

Artist Bio

Destiny Swiderski is a Vancouver Island based Métis interdisciplinary architectural designer, artist, public speaker and educator. Destiny is of Cree and Ukrainian decent and has family from Frog Lake First Nation in Alberta. During her architectural education at the University of Manitoba, she explored ideas around place-making, phenomenology, and spatial experiences. In 2010, she experimented with sculpture and installation techniques at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Her interest in how architecture and art become related is where her career in public art began as she won 3 national commissions with the City of Edmonton. Her first public art commission was a temporary artwork called Dream Catcher (2012). This 4,000 square foot dream catcher was designed and installed on a vacant piece of land in the inner city of downtown Edmonton. Working with one material in repetition became of interest to Destiny as she wanted to explore meditative qualities of this kind of process as it reminded her of Indigenous beadwork that she did as a child in her home town of Selkirk, Manitoba. Milled Wood (2015) became the ultimate test of this repetitious process as off-cuts of 2×4 spruce were cut, sanded, and stained to reproduce an optical illusion of Mill Creek Ravine in Edmonton. Immersing the viewer in a sensory experience – walking along trails wrapped by dense deciduous trees. Extensive mapping techniques were used to plan and organize more than 8,400 wood “pixels”. Each tells its own story of time place, and growth. The mural’s construction also has an auditory effect – the different wall thicknesses create “sound pockets” within the space. The project was nominated for a Prairie Design Award. In 2016, Destiny completed Amiskwacîw Wâskâyhkan Ihtâwin, a 120 foot sculptural mural made up of 152 copper silhouettes. Local bohemian wax-wing birds in all stages of flight were decorated with storytelling patterns created in artist-led Indigenous community workshops. Knowledge holders and Elders supported the project by providing the syllabics and translation for the signage. Giving hierarchy to the Cree language expressed the Indigenous roots of this special place; a place to gather and share stories about the past, present, and future. This work was celebrated as it won an American Arts Award for best places-making in an urban context. These artist-led workshops were of key interest to continue on the path of exploring community engagement techniques and teachings as Destiny created Swiderski architecture + art KIDS.- an after school architecture program for youth ages 5-15. For the next 3 years, she taught children about the fundamentals of architecture through the process of art-making. Ideas around site, genius loci, perspective drawing, model making and playground design were all explored in these programs. All of these experiences has made Destiny’s architecture and artistic practice into a diverse and inclusive approach to design and art. She wishes to continue on with Public Art for a vehicle for building capacity within the Indigenous communities around Canada and abroad, as her new work explores ideas of how to take traditional Indigenous crafts and turn them into contemporary pieces of architecture.

Ice Follies 2020 Coverage

Ice Follies 2020 opened this weekend at Marathon Beach, North Bay. If you have not had the chance to see it in person yet, you can find some great coverage of the amazing installations that are currently on display, below.

Ice Follies on Lake Nipissing Returns – BayToday.ca

Ice Follies art festival on Lake Nipissing – North Bay Nugget

La glace au cœur d’une exposition extérieure d’art public (Ice at the heart of an outdoor public art exhibition) – ICI Northern Ontario