Ice Follies 2016

February 13th - 27th, 2016

THEME: OJICHAAGOBIISHIN (IT REFLECTS IN WATER)

A call to action for other groups to engage the festival by responding to water as the source of all life on earth. With the imminent threat of land development and pipelines looming over Canada, both Aboriginal Territories and Municipalities turn their attention towards “Life”. Without the fresh water sources such as Nipissing nothing can survive. “Ojichaagobiishin” forces us to reflect on water and look at what we see. Looking in water reflects our own image back forcing us to look at ourselves. In order for the world we live in to change towards a safer, healthier place, we have to change ourselves.

The Student Temporary Art Gallery (STAG), 2016

The Student Temporary Art Gallery is a site-specific installation and exhibition project initiated and curated by 4th year Fine Arts students at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. This mini-Gallery in an ice-fishing shack will be included as an unofficial component of Ice Follies 2016.

Off the edge of the town dock, beyond the installation site, ice-shing huts are strewn as though each were erected where a stone once skipped—randomly and yet with a visual rhythm of sorts. But these temporary communities actually follow the contours of the lake bottom (above the slopes where walleye/pickerel and others are thought to linger), and so looking at these scatterings of huts is to look at a mirror of the slopes of the lake. There is one hut, though, in the shallows of the Ice Follies site that stands alone. Approaching it, you notice that the wall closest to you is covered in a minimalist, whimsical drawing of a young woman. Peering in the window, you see a salon style exhibition of drawing, painting and print work, along similar minimalist and whimsical lines. As you walk back toward the dock, you wonder if there was indeed crocheted lace on the windowsill, or if your imagination has worked that object out of a lingering sense of the micro exhibition as informed by retrospection and care for the work of hands.