SOVA faculty and collaborative team Aubyn O’Grady and Jackie Olson attended the Universities Arts Association of Canada (UAAC-AAUC) Conference (October 19-21, 2023). The UAAC-AAUC hosts Canada’s professional conference for visual arts-based research by art historians, professors, artists, curators, and cultural workers. This year, the conference was hosted at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
The duo participated on two panels:
In the Middle of Everywhere: WalkingLab Field School
Chairs: Stephanie Springgay, McMaster University & Aubyn O’Grady, Yukon School of Visual Arts | Yukon University
The walking tour was a site-specific and site-responsive method developed to tune into practices of healing, care, and remediation in Bankhead, a former mining site located just outside of Banff Town. A curated group of artists, activists, and scholars were invited to activate the walking tour, and to consider themes of extraction, settler colonialism, remediation, and place. It was not a historical tour of the site, but a live performative event that questioned and challenged place. The walk and activations were broadcast live via a portable FM radio transmitter; a roaming pirate radio station worn by O’Grady.
Activators included: Stephanie Springgay, Aubyn O’Grady, Alana Bartol, Leah Decter and Jackie Olson with soundscape interludes by Matthew Cardinal.
Bringing the University to the People: Innovative Curriculum Design and Community Engagement in Fine Arts Education
Chair: Ingrid Mary Percy, Director, Visual Arts Residencies; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Presentation title: The Willow Basket Project: Weaving expertise together at the Yukon School of Visual Arts to build community resilience
Jackie Olson & Aubyn O’Grady | Yukon School of Visual Arts, Yukon University
Abstract:
In the early 2000s the arts were introduced as a viable economic alternative to the boom-and-bust resource extraction economy (gold mining) of Dawson City, Yukon, Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Territory. The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture was established with the ultimate goal of creating an art school. As a mode of creative placemaking, the Yukon School of Visual Arts (YSOVA) – a partnership between Yukon University, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government, and the Dawson City Arts Society- was envisioned as a site of community-oriented, experimental, and land-based art pedagogies. The school’s sole offering, a foundation year program, welcomed its first cohort in 2007.
Decades later, these beloved community organizations are experiencing institutional fatigue, in a state of perpetual adaptation responding to an acute housing shortage, increasingly unpredictable weather events like floods and forest fires, issues of land sovereignty and resource extraction, the desire for new and renewable energy sources, waste diversion, and food security.This paper describes the ongoing development of the Willow Basket Project at YSOVA, an experimental land/arts-based research and education program that employs art and creative approaches to address the most pressing environmental issues within our locale. The project framework acts as a basket to weave local interest, expertise and materials into a network of interdisciplinary and geographically diverse collaborators. For example, in the Project’s first year we are collaborating with the Klondike Placer Miners Association to allow artists access to post-mined claims in the Goldfields before the reclamation process, through a “Mining Artist in Residence” program.
Partners and funders
YukonU Scholarly Activity