Sometimes, remote places are defined by what they lack as much as by what they can boast of. Yellowknife, in the subarctic region of the Northwest Territories, population 20,000, is one of the best places in the world to see the northern lights. But it doesn’t have the variety of stores or restaurants a comparably sized city down south might have. When we got a KFC a few years ago, the line to buy a bucket of chicken rivalled the line to see Prince Charles.
We have an art gallery in Yellowknife now, but we didn’t always. It doesn’t even have a name yet, and it is tiny — roughly 400 square feet. It’s tucked inside the visitor centre, where tourists go to get tips on aurora-chasing. It opened just two years ago. And as the new gallery’s first curator, as well as a writer and cheerleader for the arts, I couldn’t be happier.
Right across the road from our gallery is the infamous dive bar, the Gold Range. Anthony Jenkins, writing for the Globe and Mail, visited the bar in 1995. “Like the heart of a polar bear,” he wrote, “[the Gold Range] is big and hot and thumping, if not bloody.” As a warning to other visiting city-slickers, he also wrote, “wear shoes with tassels in here at your own peril.”
Our gallery isn’t bloody, though. At least not yet. It has the heart of a wolverine — scrappy, with a strength disproportionate to its size. At art openings we usually wear mukluks or insulated rubber boots. When looking at the art, no one uses the words “juxtaposition” or “positionality.” When introducing the artists, I use a hairbrush for a mic. This helps put people at ease and serves to remind me, a recovering art snob, that while art really matters, I don’t need to take myself so seriously.
Regional imagery dominates Yellowknife art. How can it not? Thousands of acres of wilderness begin at the end of the block. The winter skies churn with neon lights, and in the summer, time loses all meaning under the midnight sun. Horseflies are the size of birds. Ravens have been known to carry away small dogs and house cats. We have a gleaming castle made entirely of snow. There’s a lake in the centre of town, near city hall, that bubbles with arsenic, a deadly byproduct of mining. The phenomena of the North practically demand a response, and our artists enthusiastically oblige.
As the first space solely dedicated to non-commercial, contemporary art in the N.W.T., our gallery has a mission: to house art that reflects and explores the complexities of Northern life in ways that may be new or novel to local audiences. Every exhibition asks the question “What is Northern art, anyway?”
It’s a complicated question, but as the gallery’s first curator, it’s one that I love trying and never quite succeeding to answer. I moved to Yellowknife eight years ago, and began researching artists who did not simply regurgitate Northern imagery — like inukshuks, howling wolves and ravens — but who made art with imaginative and idiosyncratic powers.
One of the first artists I met was Marcus Jackson. He’s a wildlife photographer in the typical sense, but atypically, he also takes beautiful death portraits of roadkill and the remains of animals he finds in the bush. I met former prospector Walt Humphries, who’s been painting satirical watercolours about Yellowknife for the past 40 years. One of his most popular paintings depicts a group of friends fighting a phalanx of mosquitos with baseball bats, axes, shotguns and rifles.
I learned about Dene craft, too. All the small communities in the N.W.T. are home to master craftspeople — beaders, moose and caribou hair tufters, hide tanners. From Dene artists Tania Larsson and Melaw Nakehk’o, I learned the smell of rotting animal flesh. I watched clumps of moose hair tumble from the edges of their knife blades, and inhaled the fresh air scent of spruce boughs laid on the ground where they scraped their hides. I found it fascinating that while Dene land is vast, wild and untamed, Dene beadwork — showing flowers most frequently — is a pin-neat garden, utterly precise and controlled.
I also found it fascinating, and maddening, that there was no contemporary gallery in which to discuss these things. The lack of a gallery, in the territory’s capital city no less, felt like a detriment and a tragic waste of potential. How well can a region know itself, I wondered, without a gallery to tell its stories and to challenge its myths?
In 2019, myself and the other volunteers of the Yellowknife Artist-Run Community Centre — which is actually a centreless centre that has mounted art shows in churches, storefronts and empty lots — set about to correct the lack. We converted a used 16-foot cargo trailer into a mobile gallery, complete with gallery lighting and a wheelchair ramp. It’s powered with a boat battery and inverter system. We called it the Art Gallery of NWT, and promised the territorial government that if they ever decided to properly support a real arts facility, we’d happily give the name back. It functions not only as a gallery but as a bit of agitprop — a tool for arts advocacy.
We’ve pulled the mobile gallery across the city, parking it at schools, winter events and summer festivals, taking full advantage of crowds. We’ve taken it down the highway to the communities of Behchokǫ̀ and Dettah, too, inching very slowly over the parts of the road heaved upward by permafrost. The drive to Behchokǫ̀ feels, at times, like a roller-coaster.
You can’t necessarily draw a straight line from the advocacy work of the mobile gallery to our new, white-walled exhibition space across from the Gold Range, but I like to think it helped push things in the right direction. The new gallery was built by members of our municipal government who had an ear open to the art community’s concerns. It is supported financially by the city as well.
Working with both galleries has expanded my thinking about what constitutes good art. When I first moved north, I didn’t necessarily appreciate local art. It seemed too parochial. I soon realized, though, that I was wearing urban or big-city art-world blinders. I came to understand that places small enough to have gravel roads and snowmobile trails can produce art that is totally unique, free of art world conventions.
I began to write articles describing our lack of connection to the Canadian art establishment as a creative advantage. Besides, art world elitism and gatekeeping feel downright silly in a place like Yellowknife. To that end, both the mobile gallery and the visitor centre gallery show art by anyone and everyone. Renowned Sobey award winners like the Yellowknife-born, Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak? Yes. Artists that are still in high school? Emphatically, yes.
One of my favourite shows I ever curated was a suite of beautifully patinaed photographs titled Spider-Man Camera Portraits. In the 1980s, local artist Peter Cullen used his Amazing Spider-Man toy camera, purchased from the Sears Catalogue, to photograph both local heroes, like Dene chief and eventual premier Jim Antoine, and nationally known figures that came through town, like Margot Kidder and Pierre Berton. This was the first time the photos were made available to the public. It was like discovering an entire archive of local history — albeit a poignant, hilarious and highly unorthodox one.
Big art institutions are truly wonderful places. Sometimes, I really miss them — especially their rigour, professionalism and deep respect for the arts. But honestly, I think we have way more fun up here.