JOSH WINKLER & LINDSAY DOBBIN: INFO/FLOE

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Josh Winkler & Lindsay Dobbin, "Intertidal Cymbal," 2018

Opening Thursday, August 16th TBA (part of the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival)

INFO/FLOE is a project that brings together work from two methodologies of communicating with the land as archive; through listening and performance, and through synthetic reproduction of found objects. It considers the impermanence and malleability of information, language, experience and storytelling, through time-based, and print-based media. Josh Winkler, and Lindsay Dobbin have developed practices that deeply consider our relationships as stewards, protectors, active communicators and archivists of the natural environment.

During the Natural & the Manufactured residency in the summer of 2018, Dobbin and Winkler will create and present new works that continue their practice of deep listening, research, and correlation with the land, considering the natural environment as an active storyteller, performer, archivist, and foundation to our survival as a species. The final presentation will cumulate during the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival with an installation of Winkler’s work in the ODD Gallery and a temporary performance and audio/visual installation of Dobbin’s work in a location alongside the Yukon River (TBA).

Involving participatory performance, sound, and installation, Dobbin’s work is ecocentric, using listening as wayfinding. As a live performance and workshop, their work intends to deepen our relationship with the natural world, and bridge our relationships with the natural environment that have been fragmented and scattered through colonization and industrialization.

Josh WInkler’s work involves in-depth research and consideration of materials that are found in the area of the Klondike, recorded and reproduced as manufactured objects. Through bringing these objects into the gallery setting, Winkler intersects his studio work with installation work, bringing materials gathered from his walks and hikes into a place of critical contemplation, thus problematizing, and opening a conversation that reconsiders objects of “historic significance”.

Throughout this project, both artists have been carefully considering the flow of information and how it is experienced, and eventually absorbed by our physical surroundings. It is an opportunity to reflect on how all forms of information intake influences our memories that are passed on through artifact, recorded information,  environmental evidence, storytelling, or art making.

BIOGRAPHIES & PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

JOSH K. WINKLER is a Minnesota artist working primarily with traditional and contemporary print media. Since receiving his MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2010, Josh has been creating works on paper, running a small gallery, building a stone cabin, and exhibiting work nationally and internationally. He is currently an Associate Professor of Printmaking at Minnesota State University in Mankato, Minnesota. Winkler’s work stems from an interest in how humans manipulate and label the land. How time, politics, and social change alter the context of both natural and inhabited locations. By combining personal experience with historical investigation, Winkler builds layered landscape narratives to reflect on an uncomfortable disconnect between contemporary Americans and the history of the land. He utilizes a range of drawing, printmaking, and sculptural processes to facilitate these ideas.http://joshkwinkler.com

Josh Winkler will be hiking the Chilkoot Trail for two weeks as part of the Chilkoot Trail Artist Residency program where he will accumulate raw material through sketches, photographs, and mushroom spore prints that he will compile and realize during his residency at KIAC in the form of an installation at the ODD Gallery for the 2018 the Natural & the Manufactured exhibition. The installation will cumulate a variety of printed material in 2D and 3D that animate the gallery space with reproductions of objects found during both residencies. With this, Winkler continues to connect ideas of printmaking as an early form of recorded media, with questions around archival presentation, ecological stewardship, and political and environmental issues around preservation and educational access to natural materials. 

LINDSAY DOBBIN is a Mohawk – Acadian – Irish artist, musician, curator and educator who lives and works on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the L’nu. Born in and belonging to the Kennebecasis River Valley in New Brunswick, Dobbin has lived throughout the Maritimes as well as the Yukon Territory.

Dobbin’s place-responsive practice includes music, media art, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing, and is invested in and influenced by Indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices, such as drumming. Through placing listening, collaboration and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin’s practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land.

In their project, Intertidal Cymbal Works, Lindsay Dobbin honours the animacy and rhythms of water by employing drums and cymbals as tools for listening to the natural world. Working with a factory-made, four-piece drumset that was their first introduction to drumming as a child, Dobbin is dismantling the conventional use of these drums as sounding objects to be used in a specific configuration, and revealing the myriad of possibilities when in direct relation to landscape — resonant bodies that facilitate communication and relationship, and frame our experience of vast processes.

MICHAEL MCCORMACK is an intermedia artist, curator, and educator of settler ancestry living in unceded territory of the Mi’Kmaq people in K’jiputuk (Halifax). He has worked extensively within the artist-run centre community as Director of Eyelevel Gallery from 2009-2013 and president and representative of the Association of Artist-Run Centres from the Atlantic from 2011-2013. He continues to work as an independent curator for exhibitions, festivals and events, most recently for Nocturne: Art at Night (2016), Flotilla Atlantic (2017), INTERPL/\Y (2017), and KIAC’s the Natural & the Manufactured exhibition (2018). Michael completed his MFA at NSCAD University in 2015 and has been steadily exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions in public galleries, festivals, and artist-run centres  since 2003 and is currently a member of Last Chants Studio, At The Reception and Hermes Gallery in Halifax, NS.