How do you shape Canada?  How does Canada shape you? 
We're calling on young Canadians to explore, express, and showcase their individual and collective identities!

When do you feel most Canadian? And if you could express it creatively, through any medium, what would you create?

Need ideas? Check out the video

Submit your artwork today! Defining Moments is accepting photographs, paintings, videos and much more from young artists across the country. Join us by sharing your story through creative expression!
Defining Moments: Discovering Our Canadian Stories invites you to submit artwork that expresses your personal relationship with Canada. Offered by TakingITGlobal and supported by Canadian Heritage, Defining Moments is a national digital media arts and citizenship project, taking participants on a journey through accounts of Canadian identity. Open to 13 to 30 year olds across the country, we will be showcasing the artwork of young Canadians here on the Defining Moments website and a traveling exhibit. Stay tuned for our online collection, dates for workshops and exhibits near you!
Participants will have a chance of winning fantastic prizes including a trip to Ottawa!   Deadline March 1, 2012

What is your Defining Moment?

For more info check out the website or find us on Facebook or Twitter

February 19 from 12-3pm.

Musical Jam! - We’ll be rocking out at KidsFest with the Frostbite crew making and decorating our own musical instruments.

Kids Fest is a family event with live music, games, clowns, candy apples and more! This year's theme is Carnival! Face painting, colouring, crafts and world class entertainers - bring your family and dance the day away.

Location: Frostbite Main Stage at Yukon College

Single tickets to Sunday KidsFest sold separately $5 at the door.

This is partnership between the Frostbite Music Festival, Boys and Girls Club and the Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery.

Dan Sokolowski has crafted a beautiful film, Degrees North, taking viewers to places all over Canada--landscapes, waterscapes, airscapes, escapes. 

He's now created an installation you have to see to experience. 

STUDIO THEATRE installation: Degrees North

Dividing up his film into three distinct themes: air, earth and water---he's placed those images from the film on three separate screens that surround the viewer.  Feel free to sit on the bench in the middle, or walk around the outside of this installation and touch the sheets/screens.  Also, feel free to stand up and block part of the image with your own shadow.  Dan says, "It puts you in the picture!" 

I find it peaceful and creatively stimulating.  Sit there and relax and wherever you turn your head you see landscapes of the north, of Canada. 

Come see this highly interactive installation now.  It's only up till Sunday.  Sponsored by YFS and YAC. 

The Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997-)

Curious about performance art? Want to add performance to your art practice? Stop by the Old Fire Hall Sunday evening, Feb 12, 7pm, for a talk on performance art by Lori Blondeau.   Lori will give a talk on how she uses performance art in her practice and show images and video of her past work. 

Check out the Canadian Art  article:  Scandalous Personas, Difficult Knowledge, Restless Images - The work of Lori Blondeau  by Lynne Bell

Artist Statement  

The images of the Indian Princess and Squaw have had a significant impact on societies’ perception of Indian women and serve as inspirations for most of my work. Surprisingly, we still see popularized images of the Indian Princess being created by both native and non-native people. You can find these products being sold in Indian Museums and souvenir shops across North America. These are testament to the general public’s idealized perception of beautiful Native women as being exotic and hard to find – virtually non-existent. The other side of the Indian Princess is, of course, the squaw – another of societies’ iconic scapegoats meant to desensitize both the general public’s view of Indian women (their political, historical and social issues as well), and the self perception among Native women themselves.
My work explores the influence of popular media and culture (contemporary and historical) on Aboriginal self-identity, self-image, and self-definition. I am currently exploring the impact of colonization on traditional and contemporary roles and lifestyles of aboriginal women. I deconstruct the images of the Indian Princess and the Squaw and reconstruct an image of absurdity and insert these hybrids into the mainstream. The performance personas I have created refer to the damage of colonialism and to the ironic pleasures of displacement and resistance.

Biography

Born and raised in Saskatchewan where she is member of the George Gordon First Nation Lori Blondeau draws from her family history in the scripting and design of her campy, satirical, performance art productions. Blondeau’s stage persona ‘Belle Sauvage’ is loosely based on Indigenous women who performed in Wild West shows and Vaudeville acts in the early 20th century, and spoofing the 50’s film  Calamity Jane, in which Doris Day performed as a cross-dressing, gender-bending white cowgirl. Blondeau’s performance art remix of the
  Wild West presents a post-colonial reading of the narratives of Hollywood white pop culture. In her work she addresses the importance of maintaining one’s identity and beliefs as a First Nations person, and living and working in mainstream society. Blondeau confronts and co-opts conventional stereotypes in her pointed and disarmingly humorous take on contemporary art and society. In addition to her active exhibition career Lori Blondeau is the former director of Tribe, a First Nations arts organization in Saskatoon. Through this organization and related activities she is in close contact with the Indigenous art communities in Canada and the US. Most recently she has relocated to Pauma Valley, California.

Admission is by donation.

This presentation has been made possible thanks to the Yukon School of Visual Arts' Visiting Aboriginal Artists Program.  For more information about this program, please contact info @ yukonsova.ca

Yukon Arts Centre is seeking submissions of contemporary video art and digital images from Yukon filmmakers and artists for display on our lobby screens at the Yukon Arts Centre, Arts Underground and the Old Fire Hall.  The purpose of this call is to promote artists and their work to the public.

The selected artworks will be displayed for one month.  This opportunity gives local artists the ability to have their artwork shown in high traffic venues in Whitehorse, YT. All artists are encouraged to submit videos or digital portfolios.  Please note, videos and digital images must be suitable for all ages.

Please include:
Short artist bio
Artist Statement/description of the artwork
Images of the video or artwork

Please email your submissions to:
Yukon Arts Centre
Attention: Jessica Vellenga
Box 16 – 300 College Drive
Whitehorse YT
Y1A 5X9
gallery@yac.ca
(867) 393-710

Western Culture is littered with works that have as their core a deal with the Devil, or the Devil's Contract--a folk motif that pops up in everything from popular music to film to great works of literature.  Started within Christian tradition, the Devil's Contract is a staple among the folktales of European nations, and the US turned it into a cultural tradition--not the pact, but talking about the pact.  You know the drill:  Someone trades their immortal soul for power, wealth, knowledge, love, sex--and in the tragic versions, of course, the Devil gives nearly anything for that soul... and in comic tradition, the main character finds a way to cheat the Devil out of the contract.

You've probably seen more versions of this deal than you remember.   Damn Yankees, the Devil's Advocate, Crossroads, Stephen King's Christine, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Master and Margerita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, even Bedazzled where Satan is played by Elizabeth Hurley.

Sometimes the deal with the devil can be a metaphor--not the actual devil, but a very bad deal that you can't get out of--a deal you make with unscrupulous characters. Think Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street; think Tom Cruise in The Firm; think Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Star Wars.  Not to mention A LOT of music--from classical and opera to heavy metal and pop (Franz Lizst, meet Sting). 

Sometimes it can be a legend--think Robert Johnson, famous blues musician at the Crossroads, signing away his soul for the ability to play great blues music.  (I'm sure other jealous musicians thought that one up).

You can thank Faust for all these diabolical tales.  Two famous adaptations of his story, from Goethe and Marlowe in particular, have been helpful: a scholar sells his soul to the devil because study can't seem to satisfy him, and the answers to the universe are not in books.  So he throws it all away on mysticism and sorcery.  Goethe has Faust rescued and Marlowe has him condemned.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

How many more versions of the "Deal with the Devil" can you think of?  Do these Fausts win or lose against the Devil?

Gounod's Faust, the Opera on Sunday, is now set in an Atomic Bomb Factory and Faust is a middle-aged scientist trying to create the bomb first.  We got a whole new context for our deal with the Devil. 

Come hear Gounod's fabulous score and hear Jonas Kaufmann as Faust and Rene Pape as the Devil! 

If you come on Sunday, you get to enter into a draw for TWO FREE TICKETS to the Opera of your choice. 

Hey, it's Faust.  We had to make a deal with you, eh?

"Somebody's knockin'.  Should I let him in?  Lord, it's the devil, would you look at him!  I've heard about him, but I never dreamed.  He'd have blue eyes and blue jeans..."

from "Somebody's Knockin'" by Ed Penney and Jerry Gillespie, as sung by Terri Gibbs (1980)

Art Talk at the Old Fire Hall – Helen O’Connor – February 3  at 5:30

Yukon visual artist, Helen O'Connor, makes handmade paper to create sculptural works of art, assemblages and installations. Helen's work is process informed, influenced by her Canadian/Irish heritage, relationships and the wilderness surrounding her home. Her talk will introduce an array of international paper artists as well as the development of her own work over 20 years highlighting work developed during her recent travels and residency on the Orkney Islands and the north coast of Scotland, June 2010. Come out to learn about the specialized medium of hand papermaking in an international context.

A hands-on demonstration of oriental hand papermaking will follow slide show and talk.

January 22, 2012  from 1-4pm
Picture Postcards - Exploring the themes in the exhibition Untrue North, we’ll make postcards to send to family and friends that depict our version of the North we call home.

Seems every day we hear something startling about "our" way of life and "our" north.  We've all heard the one about a tourist asking, "When do you turn on the Northern Lights?"  Dogmushing to work, living in igloos, ---eek--the myths about the north still abound.  For me, it's the "Polar Bears living with Penguins" myth of the north that just makes me wanna scream.  (If polar bears and penguins lived together, penguins would be gobbled up in an afternoon). 

To celebrate the new gallery showing, "Untrue North," we'd love to collect some of these Untrue ideas of the north. 

Give us your comment below:  share with us the Untrue things YOU'VE heard about the North.  We'll collect 'em!  Keep coming back to see what other people have said--cause I can tell you now---this is gonna get weird and funny. 

And if you're up here at YAC's Art Gallery between Jan 12 and March 10 come see this great collection of art, curated by Earl Miller, that challenges what is True and Untrue about the North. 

(image presented above is NOT IN the showing--just an example of the kind of question we're asking)

We are pleased to offer an infant and toddler moccasin making class. Once you complete this class you'll have a great pair of moccains for the litte one in your life or to give away as a gift that will be cherished.  You will learn the basics of beaded design,  beading, and sewing with leather and fur.

Instructor Shelby Blackjack will be offering a 3 day lesson on how to create your very own unique handmade moccasins for infants and toddlers from Jan 22-24, 2012 at the Old Fire Hall 1105 1st Ave  Whitehorse,

Jan 22 from 10-6
Jan 23 from 6-9
Jan 24 from 6-9

Total cost $100 including materials.

Please RSVP as there is limited space.
Contact Jessica, 393 7109 or gallery@yac.ca

Here are some images of the adult version of the class.  The design will be the same - just minature