Interview With Sarah Swan: Yellowknife Forever!

Gallery Blog

Over the next few months, we’re in conversation with artists, curators, and others regarding our current exhibitions at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. 

This week, we chat with Sarah Swan, a curator and writer based in Yellowknife, about her role in curating the Yellowknife Forever! exhibition, a collaborative show featuring the work of seven artists. The exhibition is at the Gallery until Oct 13th, 2024.  

As the “Yellowknife Forever!” exhibition demonstrates, perceptions of the NWT often contrast realities. In what ways did showcasing the unique works of seven artists align with the complexities and varieties of Northern lives and experiences?  

SS: Many geographical locations deal with stereotypes and the expectations of tourists, but perhaps especially PEI, and, I think, especially the North. Maybe people who visit PEI want a certain kind of pastoral beauty, they want bucolic, they want the feeling of childhood and innocence. I mean, it’s not Vegas, right? Emotionally and psychologically, people who visit the North want a rugged, pristine, “last frontier” experience. The local art market tends to perpetuate these romantic ideals. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Northern Lights, I love the smoke rising from the woodstoves. I wear a lot of plaid flannel shirts too, as all good northerners do. But for this exhibition I wanted to show some of the truths and realities of Yellowknife. The theme of ‘Northern Gothic’ allowed me to do that. Walt Humphries’ landscapes are not pristine. They have junked furniture in them, and garbage caught in the weeds. I admire too Alison McCreesh’s willingness to talk about the forlorn feeling of living in a remote place. The feeling of isolation is sometimes lovely and sometimes uncomfortable to say the least. Ghosts can be friends or enemies, I suppose. I really admire Pat Kane’s photo of the trapper’s suburban-style garage. The wolf is not howling on a snowy tree-lined hill against a full moon. Rather, the wolf is dead, hanging by his feet. But you still get the sense of its beauty and power. It will be a startling image for some audiences. But this is real, everyday life in the North. Hunting and trapping is not sport—it is a way of life.  

Another current exhibition at the gallery is “Together Apart: Under One Roof,” which showcases three artists from Manitoba. As a curator, what are the challenges (or highlights) of working with a collective as opposed to an individual artist?   

SS: For this show, I wanted to describe Yellowknife to Islanders, and to anyone who visits the Confederation Centre of course. Curatorially, working with one artist is very different experience than working with seven. With one artist, the task is to draw out all the subtleties of their work so that the conversation around it feels full and rich. With seven artists, I can only draw out a fraction of each artist’s richness. In some ways that feels like a crime! Each artist’s work has so much more to say! But, when in service of a theme, such as The Northern Gothic, both curator and artist must be content with saying less, in a way. Exhibiting becomes about a shared experience, rather than an individual one.   

Can you speak more to how you went about balancing the perspectives and work of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists in the show, and about the wider community of artists practicing in the NWT today?   

SS: Yellowknife and the NWT is home to hundreds (thousands?) of master craftspeople. Indigenous communities have many expert traditional beaders and tufters (the practice of dying, bunching, and sewing caribou or moose hairs into three dimensional floral shapes). However, for this show I wanted to showcase contemporary artwork, which narrows down the field of possible options hugely. In my work, I have an agenda which I am completely unapologetic about: to show and promote the work of rural or geographically marginalized or non-art school educated contemporary artists. I would also like to point out to anyone who will listen that our distance from the art world can be seen as a strength. In places that are small or remote enough to have gravel roads or skidoo trails, there is often greater opportunity for intrinsically motivated, trend-averse art making. In one article, I wrote “In Yellowknife, artists don’t fear becoming obsolete because they were never fashionable in the first place.”   

Balancing the perspectives of Yellowknife art is not just about balancing the perspectives of Indigenous and Settler. It is also about balancing the perspectives of traditional craft forms vs. contemporary art. To that end, I’m very pleased to have Melaw Nakehk’o in the show. Her caribou hide sculptures are kind of creepy or eerie in the best possible way. They blend the traditional and the contemporary so very beautifully. Darrell Chocolate’s painting articulates the traditional teachings of his Dene Elders with so much respect and character. I certainly do hope that some folks will read the curatorial essay which discusses the ideas in The Northern Gothic. Does PEI have a gothic undercurrent, a ‘truer’ character underneath the pastoral? Most places do, I think. I’d love to hear what Islanders might think about that.   

Bio

Sarah Swan is a curator and writer based in Yellowknife. To help solve the NWT’s lack of exhibition space, she once turned a cargo trailer into an art gallery and drove it around Yellowknife and surrounding communities. Her bylines include Galleries West, Maisonneuve Magazine, Studio Magazine, The Winnipeg Free Press, Maclean’s Magazine, and more. She recently won a gold medal in the Alberta Magazine Publishing Awards for her essay on Artificial Intelligence titled “You Want it Darker.”