Walking through the main gallery at the Yukon Arts Centre this winter is like taking a stroll through David Curtis’s mind. Each of the dozens of sculptures and installations that make up his show, Land Mass, is based on an association Curtis has to some component of that piece — be it form, material, texture, pop cultural reference or personal experience.
“I don't expect people to get it, but in my own head, when I’m making things, I like to have fun,” Curtis says, standing in the gallery, mid-installation in late November. “I never have separated life and art. Or relationships. With anything, animals and/or people. I always incorporate things from my work life into my art and my art into my work life. So I’m always kind of in wonder and awe.”
If you know Curtis from his film work (documentaries Sovereign Soil and The Ballad of Caveman Bill), you’ll recognize a similar sensibility in the attention Land Mass pays to small but significant details. At the same time, the show has an altogether different tone from his docs. Even when Land Mass is focused on serious things, like death, decay and detrimental human impact on natural environments, the show is … fun? It’s delightful and just a bit absurdist.
For example, one of the short films on repeat in a sectioned-off corner of the gallery gives trash perhaps the most glamorous and romantic treatment it’s ever had. The black-and-white film makes the Dawson City dump a protagonist on par with Audrey Hepburn as Curtis’s camera pans languidly across abandoned cars, scavenging ravens and mountains of discarded items, all to the tune of a 1950s cocktail-hour soundtrack. While it highlights just how much we use and discard, it’s kind of a beautiful homage to the site Curtis sourced many of the materials for the show.
Land Mass includes massive works, like a tarp-covered wooden pushcart cradling a satellite dish that serves as a screen for video footage of insects; rubber-covered sculptures that look like rich cakes, with holes and perches punched in place so a bird could nest inside; a tiny silver fingertip mounted on the wall behind a door; and a giant 3-D printed version of Curtis’s own ear on another wall. Nothing has a label or title card. That’s intentional. Curtis wants people to bring their own experiences to a show that’s built around his.
He points at a wall where the hubcap of an 18-wheeler is covered in ropy lines of hot glue that extend out from the centre of the cap. Curtis was struck one day by the starfish-shaped crust of ice on a friend’s hubcap after they’d made the drive from Whitehorse to his off-grid cabin in West Dawson. When he couldn’t get it out of his mind, he replicated it.
Curtis suggests people come to the show thinking of its individual components as set pieces for an opera that they, as viewers, have to write for themselves.
Also in the main gallery, Jackie Olson’s The Land Speaks to Me, is slightly more prescriptive in its narrative. When viewers see her paper forms and prints, Olson wants them to walk away with greater mindfulness around the way they interact with the land — to smell the air while hiking a trail, to notice the difference in light, to consider their choices.
“You know, the land is meant to be used, but it has to be used mindfully and with purpose,” she says. “You don't just take a bunch of stuff out of it because you can. If I’m coming out with a bundle of willow, I have to deal with it.”
The way Olson deals with willow is by turning it into paper she uses to print with bits of metal machinery and detritus she finds on the same land as her willow.
Growing up in Dawson City, a citizen of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, Olson says she noticed something particular to living in a mining area — people often discard things when they’re done with them, where they’re done with them.
“And nature covers it up,” says Olson, who teaches at the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson. “But when they were expanding the Hunker Road to support the White River Mine, they peeled back the sides of the road and all this stuff started to pop out.”
Metal, bottles and random pieces of what some consider history, Olson considers garbage. She is, however, interested in the relationship between the organic and the industrial, and how one can hide evidence of the other even if both are still there. To her, that signals resilience, reclamation and the land’s ability to adapt.
The Land Speaks to Me includes a length of corrugated steel siding so thin and rusted, it looks like cheesecloth. Opposite it is the piece of cotton Olson printed an impression of siding on to. She’s also made paper casts of a grate that would have, at some point, been used in the process of washing gold. To her, these pieces echo what has happened on her land.
On another wall are large pieces of Olson’s willow paper (sometimes with the inclusion of onion skin, garlic, corn husk, potato water and other natural ingredients) arranged horizontally. They look almost religious. The concentric circles on them don’t create repeating patterns, but together, they seem to be telling different parts of the same story. Each piece features the orange imprints of rusted bits of metal Olson has found, both on the land and at the Dawson dump. In some, the shape is clear enough to see that the metal she used was a chain, or chunk of I-beam, or a tin panel from the ceiling at the Dawson’s former Midnight Sun. In others, there’s just a ghost impression of the metal. Many of the markings have a soft blue halo around them, the result of iron interacting with the willow tannins.
Olson, who originally trained as a painter, has taught herself every step of this process over the years. Process, rather than product, is where her interest lies as an artist. It’s not about the finished piece. The skill is the goal.
“It’s one more ingredient to throw into a pot,” she says. “So I create and I learn and I keep doing it until I understand it.” She pauses. “Then it gets boring,” she says, laughing. “I’m not a producer.”
Both exhibits run until Feb. 20. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and during evening performances.
