For the Love of Dunes
Battling wind that whipped sand across faces and canvases, 15 artists hunkered down in the Carcross sand dunes to document the area’s beauty.
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Fierce Bunny Charms
In the basement of a Takhini home, artist Sonja Ahlers sews soft-sculpture bunnies that function as dolls, talismans or jewelry, depending on the buyer’s mood.
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Supporting the Girls
Breast health. It’s a phrase that might sound as boring as the ingredients from the side of a good-for-you bran cereal box. That is, unless
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A Clown for Song and Silliness
Here’s my list of the top three ways to make friends. One, go on a trip. Two, enjoy a meal together. Three, share a laugh.
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Duels and Prey: Artful Egos
Welcome to Guns ‘n’ Ammo, your friendly one-stop firearm, tank and contortionist show! This is not a quote from the artist statements at the ODD
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Travel & Fireworks
I’ve been thinking that the classic image of friends gathered in a living room, politely yawning through someone’s 300 vacation slides, hasn’t really gone away.
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Freestylin’ in Pelly Crossing
“Hip hop as a culture is based on freestyle, with a lot of focus on individuality and expression,” says breakdancer Nick Robinson. “So those are
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Subarctic Sessions
The subconscious is so much smarter than we give it credit for. I’m not anti-technology. I can’t be, since technology is what’s allowing me to
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Airdog Action
For the uninitiated, hearing the words “boarder” and “rail” together might conjure an image of a skateboarder doing tricks along the guardrail of a public
Subarctic Sessions: In Praise of Winter Baking
December is a perfect time to indulge my love of baking. Not only will people eat more – they’re in a festive spirit – but
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Things Float Up Magical
Rosemary Scanlon made a digital garden once. And working in Photoshop for hours a day drove her to pick up paintbrush and watercolour again. Through
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Festive Cake Balls
Cake Balls are a nice replacement for classic rum balls – lighter in texture because their insides have more cake than icing sugar
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Films and Dreams
Okay film-lovers, try this. Go stand close to a mirror, eight or nine inches away. Look steadily for a full second into one eye, then
To Music, Together
Has anyone heard of archerfish?” Joe Cooke describes how this fish can see both above and below water, and he encourages the musicians ringed around
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Dreams Beyond Sugar and Spice
Every Sugar Plum Fairy has years of dreaming danced into her feet. The same goes for a Clara, a Prince, or a Rat Queen. These
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A Camera Lover’s Threshold for Cold
Though winter has brought frostbite-risk weather, a familiar sight in Dawson has been the silhouette of a young man carrying a large tripod with a
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Playing For Change
One of the best ways to catch people’s attention is to bring the heart into the equation. That’s exactly what two local women’s organizations hope
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DEW Line Devices
The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, built from 1954-57, demonstrated strongly how technology became a dramatic part of how nations claim space in the North,
Space For Skin Memory
When Sara Tilley was 11, her family moved from St. John’s (NL) to Sanikiluaq (then-NWT, now NU) for a year. Years later, Tilley wanted to
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Writing Circumpolar Space
Temperature and light extremes are similar across circumpolar countries, but comparing the waterfronts of Whitehorse and Reykjavák might reveal interesting contrasts in what “North” means.
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Draw Yourself In
Most people talk about enjoying drawing when they were kids, says David Curtis as he explains his International Self-Portrait Gallery. That’s a big part of
Hot Truths and Half-frozen Films
A film director is pivotal in creating the environment and tone for people to work in, and in Lulu Keating’s recent short films the setting
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Briefly Speaking
If history starts as soon as the minute you’re in passes by, then anyone who writes or makes art can make a history piece, right?
Build Me Up, Mentor
is the result of 10-month-long learning relationships between master artists and mentees
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Personal Migrations
In the Yukon Arts Centre’s Public Gallery, the Open Season exhibition presents work by four artists with relationships between Yukon and Ontario: two from Ontario
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Love It or Leave It
Sometimes late at night I make believe I am sleeping next to someone so I don’t feel so alone. A meandering row of worn, travel-marked
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Portable Weatherproof Husks
AYukoner goes south and falls into both pleasure and lament. Oh, Vancouver. I come to visit you and what do you do? Rain, rain, rain
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Conversation Queen
This year’s edition of the biennial Whitehorse Poetry Festival sees one of Canada’s most informed, experienced and eloquent lovers of literature at three different events
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Satellites and Other Evolutions
Ididn’t mean to trust Google so much. I knew in some corner of my mind that Google Earth constructs images from satellite data, but it’s
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Have Brush, Will Travel
Nicole Bauberger knows her way around a colour wheel, and these days she’s also navigating her way around a fair chunk of Canada’s highway system.
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Touched by Type
New Delhi 2006. February, not too hot but dry and warm enough for dust to mix with exhaust as my India-experienced friend and I walk
Capsule of Berlin
A room-sized capsule of contemporary art from Berlin is about to open at the ODD Gallery, where the walls will be hung with close to
??Women’s Day in Art, Music & Word
A colourful moment catches my eye as I stand in line at the deli this week. Two hands meet across the top of the cheese
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Boreal Bounty
Bev Gray has spent years studying and working with the food and health uses of berries, blossoms, roots and leaves that grow in the Yukon
Embrace of the Indian Brand
Horror and wonder have a close kinship, and the relational blood between them is the potential for transformation. Joseph Tisiga grew up bouncing between a
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Klondike Catwalk
In a show of pre-season energy akin to athletes’ pre-game excitement, Parks Canada interpreters Carrie Docken and Carly Sims gallantly put on their copies of
Centre Ice to Stage Centre
The high points of hockey games start turning into stories minutes after they happen, with post-game analyses happening from rink-side bench to living-room holler to
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On Fire at 5 AM
Book-lovers of all kinds and all ages are about to enter an exciting week as two literary festivals come to the Yukon. Five writers will
Heritage New & Old
When Natasha Peter walks into the coffee shop, she’s grinning with excitement. “We were just down the street looking at rifles,” she says of her
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Table Tennis Convergence
Whether you trained in a strict three-month clinic in China, or take your games in casual doses at a community centre, this weekend’s Yukon Table
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Double Minds, Double Exposures
Something was different upstairs at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture that afternoon. The wood floors and high ceilings make the second-floor ballroom usable
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Environment Fair 2011
We make decisions about the natural environment we live in every day, whether we do it on purpose or not. Drinking water, food sources, clean
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The Constant Ukelele
Pat LePoidevin’s new album Highway Houses embraces the extremes of Northern seasons – the heat, the cold and the mysterious, romantic moments in between. LePoidevin
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The 23½ Hour Day
When I bike up to the Berton House Writers’ Retreat, I don’t notice poet Jacob McArthur Mooney at first. He’s sitting in the shade on
A Crush on You
A year of conversations in my editorial role with What’s Up Yukon has passed quickly. Writing about a place is a fast-track to meeting people,
Weaving Between the Lines
Blurred black-and-white words fill the walls and part of the floor of the ODD Gallery this month, as Caitlin Erskine-Smith’s text-inspired weavings inhabit the Dawson
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Bringing the Wilderness Home
Caribou are the marrow of life in northern Yukon. In the caribou migration we found searing lessons about birth and death, survival, and the fragility
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Summer Fortitude
Supplies!” A brightly painted sign at the far end of the Confluence Gallery in Dawson City sits in front of a 15-foot deep collection of
Women in Pigment and Time
Shelley Hakonson, like many Yukon visual artists, connects with audiences outside the territory by showing work across the continent. Last year the Dawson City mixed
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Internet Jukebox
People who enjoy sharing music files with friends don’t need to change their habits, says guitarist and songwriter Bill Henderson in a lead-up interview to
Shifting Prairie Spaces
Imagine a dark, slender, vertical shape leaning into the distance. If there’s nothing else in view that indicates scale, it can be hard to tell
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Let’s Talk Tubers
One of the first things I did when I moved to the Yukon in April 2009 was take a gardening course with legendary Klondike gardener
Bolex on the Road
Road trip lore has a rich presence in Canadian and US films, books and songs. Dan Sokolowski’s film, Degrees North, screening at the Available Light
Random Acts of Sunlight
This summer I learned that random acts of sunlight, a broken lawnmower and tolerant neighbours can lead to a lot of delicious, surprising salad ingredients
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Out of the Forest
Humans are attracted to animals on an instinctual level, yet more than 50 percent of us now live in urban settings, worldwide (as of 2008).