Five Northern Artists Deal with Distancing During the Pandemic

Relative isolation protects northerners, but is also the region's greatest challenge.

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The North feels bewilderingly large and provincially small at the same time. Vast distances separate dots on the map, many of which are reachable only by ice road or bush plane, yet everyone knows everyone. A mere 45,000 people live in the Northwest Territories and 42,000 in Yukon. The pandemic has not wreaked the havoc it could have as strict social distancing measures were implemented early on, many of which are still in place. The relative isolation protects northerners, yet it is also the region's greatest weakness. Medical facilities are dangerously limited, and the crisis echoes a not-so-distant history, when tuberculosis, measles and influenza all but wiped out many small communities. 

Alison McCreesh

They say there’s two types of northerner – those who love living in the North and those who love complaining about living in the North. Alison McCreesh, a graphic novelist, illustrator and fibre artist, has lived in Yellowknife since 2009. She belongs firmly in the first camp, travelling extensively in other northern countries as part of her art practice. She makes drawings, books and films that record sensitive and humorous observations about life above the 60th parallel. But her recent body of work, a series of pages that superimpose cyanotype prints of northern communities with watercolour figures, is more sombre.  Each figure, says McCreesh, “embodies movement, passage, transition and stillness, themes that are shared throughout the circumpolar world, both literally and figuratively.” Although she started the work before COVID-19 became a serious threat, it quickly shifted context. As last year wore on, each painted figure developed a ghostly quality, seeming to articulate the absence of people in communal settings, the palpable sense of isolation. Her precise, delicate rendering – in some places the paper is barely skimmed with pigment – shows blue figures hunched in jackets, hoods and tuques, giving the series a cold and wistful feel. The North has never looked more lonely or more beautiful.

Melaw Nakehk’o

To record K’i Tah Amongst the Birch, Yellowknife-based artist Melaw Nakehk’o wedged her iPhone in the crook of a tree. Her 10-minute film is part of the National Film Board’s The Curve, a series of social distancing stories from across the country.  Last May, as winter loosened its icy grip on the North, Nakehk’o went ‘out on the land’ with her family. Living on the land is a way for Dene families to practice their traditional ways of life, but also, when the new threat of COVID-19 loomed, a way to retreat to safety. The film is beautifully paced, punctuated with scenes of work and rest. Nakehk’o scrapes a moose hide and her son chops wood. “I hope you can hear that,” she says, turning the camera on herself. “The ice is moving!” She listens, her face attentive, voice dropping to a whisper: “Oh my God, it’s so amazing! It’s been a long time since I’ve slept next to the river during breakup.” Nakehk’o and her family seem so content it’s possible to forget the pandemic chaos elsewhere in the world. At the camp, finches fly tree to tree, birch branches fork into the sky and everything – the land, the river, the air – is softening in the spring temperatures. When watched as part of the NFB series, the contrast with other works is remarkable. Galen Johnson’s film, for example, shot from a highrise apartment in Winnipeg, is filled with the racket of motorcycles and squealing trains. In Nakehk’o’s film, although she used no audio equipment, you can actually hear individual snowflakes falling. 

Kimberly Edgar 

Even in the age of social media, which has accustomed us to reading personal admissions by relative strangers, Kimberly Edgar’s art can feel a little raw. Edgar, based in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory in Dawson City, Yukon, is chronically ill. The artist’s work – which blends comic art, drawing and watercolour – often translates physical and emotional anguish into fantastical, fleshy ecosystems. Flora and fauna sprout and grow, the exquisite manifestation of suffering. During the pandemic, Edgar has been making drawings that describe Northern precariousness and the delicate balance in living somewhere with a small population but little medical infrastructure. “We feel safe due to our distance,” Edgar says, “but does that isolation also make us vulnerable?” Titled Fruit/Soil, Edgar’s drawings were recently published as an art book by Moniker Press. Given the strangeness of pandemic life, the visual narratives are appropriately ambiguous. Their exploration of mortality in a playful style makes deadly sense. One drawing depicts buried bodies, wrists encircled with hospital bracelets. In another, a corpse returns to the earth. Fungi and mushrooms push up through eye-sockets, insects crawl in and out, and seeds erupt from rotting flesh. In Edgar’s vernacular, even the brightest and most verdant foliage casts a dark shadow. 

Doomkitsch

The North produces its fair share of sentimental paintings of starry skies and cozy cabins. But the artist known as Doomkitsch, born in Iqaluit but based in Yellowknife, prefers anxiety to comfort. His large-scale drawings have an obsessive quality that’s built with fidgety layers of low-brow materials: cheap pens and airbrushed Crayola markers. Doomkitsch graduated in 2018 from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary and has been exploring the visual tropes of mysticism, conspiracy theories and horror-gore ever since. He uses various pseudonyms to "barricade his true self from the malignant horrors of the wider world." When the pandemic hit, his dark ruminations turned more political. His subject matter – evil, madness, greed – rose to the obvious surface of everyday life as America devolved into chaos with nefarious puppet-masters at the helm. Doomkitsch's recent work has been influenced by several outsider artists. "These artists, like Henry Darger, were unconcerned with who would see their work," he says. "It gave them the freedom to truly get there. Outsider artists aren’t bogged down with the weight of getting it right and so make some truly unique stuff." Doomkitsch’s work is part teenage-goth dream and part terrifying reality, depending how much you believe in aliens or pervasive totalitarian malice, of course. Regardless, its imperfections glow. There are places in his dense walls of ink with evidence of markers running dry. You can almost hear the squeak of them, pushing on until they bleed out completely. 

Kaylyn Baker

Choosing to focus on beauty is a rare response to the pandemic, yet such a valid one. Northern Tutchone and Tlingit artist Kaylyn Baker, based in Yukon, was heart-sick over the loss of an entire year’s worth of opportunities and income. Nevertheless, she positioned herself – both literally and metaphorically – to “soak up the sun.” Baker beads and makes caribou-hair tuftings using traditional techniques, although she has gained notoriety for her hyper-bright, anti-conventional spin on traditional floral designs. She was to be a visiting artist at Whitehorse’s Adäka festival, and was planning to attend the Moosehide festival near Dawson City and the biennial Celebration in Juneau, Alaska, which brings together Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures. All were postponed, so Baker began work on a shawl adornment. She titled the piece Two Halves of Summer, describing both disappointment and hope. To bead each half, she drew on memories of visiting her partner’s ranch near Telegraph Creek, B.C. A massive fire had swept through the surrounding area in 2017, but Baker noticed the new growth. “The flowers that bloomed were amazing,” she says. “So many different shades.” Two Halves of Summer offers a plethora of colour and life with petals and leaves looping and twisting in complex arrangements of line, pattern and texture. All of Baker’s work has an epic feel – it’s obvious she puts hours of labour and lots of passion into each creation. The materials she uses read like an ingredient list for a defiantly beautiful visual feast: Baltic amber, copper, coral, 24-karat gold, Delica and satin beads, caribou hair, Swarovski crystals, garnet, silver, French seed beads, strawberry quartz, lava rock and magnesite. ■ 

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