It's Time To Come Home
Yellowknife exhibition celebrates Dene art, creativity

Jake Kimble, “When The Lights Come On That Means It’s Time To Come Home,” 2023, archival inkjet print (courtesy of Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery)
In the novel You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, the protagonist George Webber writes a book about his hometown. But when he returns to the town, he’s met by fury and outrage. The townspeople feel betrayed, and he becomes a social outcast.
Thankfully, this fate is not one that is shared by the artists in It's Time to Come Home, on until July 31, 2025 at the Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery, Northwest Territories.
While the three artists in the show are from the NWT, each has moved away – Jake Kimble and Hana Steinwand to pursue education and career, and Laura Grier after being adopted as a child and raised in Alberta.
The aim of the exhibition, according to curator Laura Hodgins, is to celebrate a homecoming of Dene creativity and to introduce Yellowknifers to the wider Dene contemporary art scene.
Shy introductions were definitely made (Yellowknife’s relationship with conceptual art and its heady trappings is relatively new).

Jake Kimble, “Indian Cabins,” 2025, inkjet print on paper towel (courtesy of Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery)
But under the surface of first impressions, the show glimmers with the same ambiguities felt by Webber — or by anyone, for that matter — who’s ever felt tensions between North/South, big city/small town, Settler/Indigenous, or home/away, stirring around in their own beautifully complicated identities.
Kimble’s photographs feel especially ephemeral, given that they’re printed on paper towels, of all things. But the series, depicting scenes around their family home in the South Slave region of Denendeh is, in the artist’s own description, a love letter to the North. It’s written, so-to-speak, with intimate vernacular. Locals only. #IYKYK.
Kimble’s work describes the kind of beauty found in worn out familiarity — old springs and brown velour.
But it also describes the quintessential northern shittiness that is Indian Cabins. The last-stop gas station is tucked under the NWT-AB border, and it’s never open when you need it to be. Kimble’s soft scenes of rough beauty gave me pangs of future nostalgia. I’m still here, but if I leave the North one day, it will be exactly these scenes and this kind of shittiness that I will so achingly miss.

Hana Steinwand, “i dream of medicine,” 2023, beadwork on found fabric (courtesy of Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery)
Hana Steinwand’s beaded pieces are like personal letters too, though ones with more questions than declarations. Steinwand began beading while a Fine Arts student at Simon Fraser University (she graduated with her BFA in 2023). The traditional craft helped her stay connected to her Tłı̨chǫ culture while living so far from home. Though her beaded bear, wolf, and beaver seem to float, unanchored, in a neutral sea of grey, plants and streams flow from their feet, resembling roots. There’s a tension, here. Steinwand has purposefully eschewed the traditional perspectives of Western landscape — there’s no horizon line, for example — to give the animals a new or different kind of home. But, thus far anyway, it’s a home viewers can only wonder about or imagine.

Laura Grier, “Bekǫ̀ ne idikǫ̀ ne,” 2025, letterpress print (courtesy of Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery)
Typophiles will love Laura Grier’s letterpress prints of Dene syllabics. Grier, who is a diehard printmaker and a PhD candidate at York University, recently finished a residency in Banff where they made a set of wood and 3D printed type. Handprinted pamphlets and posters have played crucial roles in history’s revolutionary causes of course, and Grier intentionally employs this ethos when learning about and printing Dene dialects.
In 2023 and 2024, Grier handprinted two zines that, in part, describe a beautifully conceived Dene Printmaking Methodology and call for freer, more open use of language in academia. Both are available to download (for free!) on their website.
All their prints in this show were inspired by the title of Kimble’s photo and the show’s titular piece, When The Lights Come On That Means It’s Time To Come Home. It’s a line that contains so much everyday poetry. What free-wheeling, small-town kid doesn’t remember the feeling of seeing their windows aglow in a darkening sky? It’s getting late. I’m getting hungry. Better go in.

Laura Grier, “It's Time to Come Home,” letterpress print (courtesy of Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery)
Yet in Kimble’s piece, the line has a double meaning. The lights of home are also the Northern Lights. The naked figure in the photo reaches ecstatically towards them. Whether a sincere description of being moved by beauty or an irreverent way to poke fun at Northern tropes, the photograph makes people laugh. Maybe every northerner should, at least once, get naked and dance under the northern lights as Kimble did. But maybe the photo is about our home in the sky, too. Butt-naked we came, butt-naked we shall return.
What I hope Yellowknifers notice is that Grier’s letters and syllabics are not slick or impersonal but are imperfectly aligned, handmade and homespun. Steinwand’s fabrics have the feel of a favourite, faded sweatshirt rescued from the donation bin.
Paper towel is also low-key and plebian, just like the north is. Kimble uses its absorptive properties metaphorically. “I want to soak up these times and keep them with me forever,” they wrote on Instagram (I personally want to thank Kimble for ensuring I never take the embossed patterns of various paper towel brands for granted again).
At the end of You Can’t Go Home Again, Webber realizes “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time.”
But through their unique material choices, these three artists have, in fact, upended the pensive sadness of that famous expression’s sentiment. They are returning home with even more love, humour, and sense of possibility than they left with. ■
Jake Kimble, Hana Steinwand and Laura Grier, It's Time to Come Home, is on until July 31, 2025 at the Yellowknife Visitor Centre Gallery, Northwest Territories.
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The Yellowknife Visitor Centre art gallery
5014 49 Street, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
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