Jackie Olson's The Land Speaks to Me
“These works welcome us in without the promises of forever contained in many manufactured art materials”

Installation view, Jackie Olson, “The Land Speaks to Me,” on view at Yukon Arts Centre (photo by Mike Thomas/Yukon Arts Centre)
A video greets visitors on the way into Jackie Olson’s exhibition, The Land Speaks to Me, at the Yukon Arts Centre, on now through Feb. 20. I sit down and put on the headphones. I see hands stripping bark from willow wands. The knife creates a corkscrew curl of willow wood – the maker stops to play with it a moment.
I hear the sounds of scraping, and the rattle of a projector. The images have been made to look as if shot on scratchy film.
A dog barks behind me. I turn around. It’s just in my headphones. The film seems to offer an experience of making art in the midst of life. We are invited to feel the cutting of bark with a knife and weaving it, feel the needle beading, to hear the knocking sounds of other work going on, and birdsong.
On the title wall, a small arch of white peeled willow wands sways against the wall, ajar like an open door. A fringe of its bark hangs from the bottom, casting a gorgeous shadow.
Stepping inside the gallery, high overhead, rust-filled paper glows with the light behind, heavy and yet light.
To the viewer’s right, a very rusted piece of the corrugated metal that makes up much of Dawson City’s urban landscape hangs, mounted like a painting, a long horizontal rectangle.
Facing it, across the space, Olson has placed its rust-print onto canvas. So much rust! Some print marks twinkle with rusted metal.
Looking up from the print, I see that the ceiling works are also corrugated, having picked up their rust from similar material.

Installation view, Jackie Olson, “The Land Speaks to Me,” on view at Yukon Arts Centre. Olson has laid her willow paper over metal elements from Dawson's urban landscape (photo by Mike Thomas/Yukon Arts Centre)
On another wall, Olson has laid her paper pulp, made of willow and other natural materials from the land, over other metal elements of Dawson’s urban landscape. Rust continues to play variations to the repetition of casts of pressed tin ceiling panels you might see in one of Dawson’s Gold Rush era buildings. Below a three-by-three grid of these, long rectangles made of four sides — I suddenly remember the Dawson buildings sided in metal from opened square tins.
Olson has also laid her paper onto metal screens for sifting gravel in placer mining operations. These grids are heavy, and so when I peek around behind the paper, held to the wall with mere magnets, to see the grids are gone, I feel the magic of her having transformed something heavy into so much lightness.
On the wall facing these, Olson offers a series of rust prints onto this paper, marked predominantly with the circles industrial society makes in iron. The iron seems react with the pinkish paper to make grey shadows around the more defined rust marks.
In this exhibition Olson invites us into an ephemeral space, a moment in the lives of these materials. As a citizen of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, born and raised in Dawson City, Olson stands in the power of her relationship to the land. She works with natural materials to make her paper and invites it to explore some of the manufactured elements of her landscape. The artworks follow the real consequences of materials following their natures, guided by Olson’s artistic choices.

Installation view, Jackie Olson, “The Land Speaks to Me,” on view at Yukon Arts Centre. Here, Olson transforms heavy metal grids used to sift gravel onto rust-marked paper (photo by Nicole Bauberger)
These works welcome us in without the promises of forever contained in many manufactured art materials.
Still, I feel a kind of trust that these materials have had their lives before this exhibition, and will go on living in their own ways afterwards, whatever else might happen.
You can explore fellow Dawson resident David Curtis’ exhibition Land Mass in the adjacent gallery over the same duration. ■
Jackie Olson, The Land Speaks to Me, and David Curtis, Land Mass are on view at the Yukon Arts Centre through Feb. 20
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Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery
300 College Dr (PO Box 16), Whitehorse, Yukon Y1A 5X9
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