Jackie Olson | The Land Speaks to Me

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Jackie Olson, “The Land Speaks to Me,” 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

The Land Speaks to Me offers a rare glimpse at her collected works-in-process: Olson makes works that want to be returned to the land, and many of her works have already been curated back. Olson harvests willow and other natural material from the land, breaks the material down to its fibres, and turns it into a paper pulp which she uses to cast and recast paper forms. Countering the organic, bits of industrial refuse recovered by Olson show up in her paper works as imprints, reliefs, and stains, representing the power of the land to adapt, recover, and reclaim.

About Jackie

Jackie Olson was born and raised in Dawson City and is a citizen of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. Trained as a painter, Jackie received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art in 1992, and has been creating and learning new art forms since. Jackie’s work has been featured in exhibitions across Canada including the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, AB), Harcourt House (Edmonton, AB), and a recent solo exhibition at the ODD Gallery (Dawson City, YT).

Her work lives in many private and public collections, including the Bavaria State Anthropology Museum (Germany), Indigenous Art Centre (Canada), and the Yukon Permanent Art Collection (Canada). Jackie holds a faculty position with the Yukon School of Visual Arts, and recently curated the DIRE exhibition in Dawson City, which invited several Indigenous northern artists to create new works honouring salmon-as-life. In 2022 Jackie was awarded the Yukon Hall of Innovator’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her transformative reimagining of age-old Yukon practices as an inspired new way of creating art.