Fenix House

Art inspired by conversations with friends

“A house is a big thing out there in the street. Why not art it up?” asked Tanya Handley, Whitehorse-based graphic designer and upcycling artist, when I asked her about Fenix House.

Fenix House stands at the northeast corner of 6th Avenue and Wood Street in downtown Whitehorse. Handley owns the building in partnership with Bill Slater, an environmental engineer, and his wife Shehnaz Ali. All three came to the Yukon in 1992 and became friends.

They were looking for a project in 2009. Slater needed an office. Handley and Slater, having building skills, thought that they should buy an old house and renovate it. Soon they realized that no one else would have pulled the house back from the state it was in. The basement was avalanching. The original builders hadn’t done the footings right. They took down walls and replaced them, redoing 50 feet of wall on three sides.

The top floor had rotted out because it was made before the introduction of vapour barriers. So they removed it and added a taller second floor but kept the same roof line. It began to seem like a miracle. When their friends came by to see what they were doing, they told them to tear it down.

Instead, they made it into a work of art.

“We think more like renovators than build-from-scratchers,” reflected Handley. They bought their 23 windows used. That’s where the distinctive half-moon window comes from. It was originally meant to be an arch, but they put it on its side. “It didn’t work to put it the other way.” That’s also where they got their circular window.

Many of the design choices were determined by what was available in triple-paned windows. Handley observes that the group’s creative process starts with “what do we have” rather than “I can have anything I imagine: What do I want?” Moving towards zero waste and reusing things are values that they share.

Handley travelled on the Camino in 2010. The renovation was unexpectedly still in progress, as these things often go. She noticed that almost every town had a “Fenix” street and she told her friends about it. When she got back home, they were calling it the “Fenix House,” referring to the mythological bird more commonly spelled phoenix, in English, which is reborn from fire.

For the house’s fiery colours, Ali is from Trinidad and she and Handley agree that flashy colours look best in winter. People know Fenix House for its yellow and orange colours.

Handley reminisced about the beauty of Victorian houses—the “gingerbread” ornamentation that people worked on for years.

Fenix House has many artistic touches, which you can see from the street. Handley said the reason she added these touches is partly because she’s the owner. She didn’t have to apply to anyone to do it. She just had to ask her co-owners, and they always said yes.

For example, there’s a dead tree at the corner. Handley was going to take it down, but her friend and neighbour, Sally Wright, said it was a stable structure. So Handley cut birds out of hardboard, painted them and installed them in the tree.

The railings of the wheelchair accessibility ramp echo the lines of that tree. Handley doesn’t weld, so she teamed up with another friend, Katherine Alexander, who had gone to welding school, to make that ramp.

The tree motif also appears on the alley side of the house. Handley wanted to put art there to avoid graffiti—“beat them to the punch”—and so far, it’s worked well.

If you continue on around the alley side of the building, you’ll see an owl that Handley made using up the scraps from the birds in the tree.

And as for the raven on the front of Fenix House, when Handley had to paint the house, after its first 10 years, she rented a Genie boom, which she said was “super fun!” She rented it for a three-day weekend and, when she finished repainting the house, used it to put up the raven.

Handley used the scrap siding from Fenix House to make the frame for an enormous owl sculpture. She used worn-out bike tires and tubes (from Cadence Cycle) to make its body. It still stands outside the Yukon Conservation Society at Hawkins Street and 3rd Avenue, a few blocks away. Tourists have their pictures taken with it.

Handley often does graphic design work for the Yukon Literacy Coalition. If you visit their building in the Pioneer Hotel between the skating rink and the river, down at Shipyards Park, you can see more of her work. Handley found deadfall in the forest and rusticized the chain-link fence around their garden, adding whimsical concentric-design elements. Also, if you look closely, you’ll notice that the metal shutters over the windows aren’t the blank dull-grey of buildings nearby. Handley worked hard on creating realistic compositions from photographs, adding enough reflections that the dogs, for example, in the illusionist windows, look like they’re behind glass.

Fenix House will be one of the stops on a walking tour of downtown public art by current and past members of Yukon Artists at Work (YAAW). Tours will leave from the YAAW gallery at 4th Avenue and Wood Street at 2 p.m. on January 13, 20 and 27.
Find out more about Tanya Handley’s work at www.bearbait.ca/index.html