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.
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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.
Derek Knight, Duncan MacDonald & Melissa Smith, H.O.M.E.S.: Expedition Model, 2008
Derek Knight, Duncan MacDonald & Melissa Smith are a recently formed collective of artists from St. Catherines. For Ice Follies they created a research station in the form Im an inflatable iceberg. Their pseudo-organization, The Great Lakes Institute, officially proclaimed Lake Nipissing a great lake on February 23rd, 2008.
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.
Lise Beaudry, Video Ice Hut #1, 2006
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…
FASTWÜRMS, Ice Station Isis, 2006
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…
Simon Frank, Hut, 2006
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…
Lori Grace Johnson, Meander, 2006
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…