Yukon SOVA welcomes Spring Hurlbut as Artist-in-Residence

The Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City is pleased to announce Spring Hurlbut as our official SOVA Artist in Residence at KIAC’s Macaulay House.

Spring is an internationally acclaimed artist with a diverse and fascinating practice. She works with ideas of human mortality, ephemerality, collecting and multiples to produce breathtaking work.

For the past several years, Spring Hurlbut’s work has examined themes of life and death using motifs of stillness and motion. Her photography, installations, videos and sculptures, which use taxidermied animals, human remains and, most recently, ventriloquists’ dummies, confront us with our own mortality.

Among her many past projects,  an important turning point was when Spring worked for a year researching and presenting an installation at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto entitled "The Final Sleep", creating a "museum within a museum." The work involved selecting 400 objects from the over 10 million items in the ROM's historic collections. She decided on a selection of white and albino birds and animals that she found preserved as study skins and skeletons lying in the endless drawers in the scientific study collection and never intended for public displays.

Spring has been recognized with exhibitions in New York, San Paulo, Paris, Stuttgart, and Mexico; & at the Natural History Museum in Ottawa, the National Gallery of Canada, the Manchester Museum, the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, and the 2010 Canadian Biennale.

While in Dawson, Spring will be working directly with Veronica Verkley’s students at SOVA, as well as conducting her own research through connecting with the many diverse historical collections here including the Dawson City Museum, Parks Canada collections and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in archives, all of whom are graciously granting Spring special access during her residency.

On Sunday January 26 at 7pm, Spring will give an artist talk in the KIAC Ballroom; followed by a screening of the film Spring & Arnaud  co-directed by past KIAC filmmaker in residence Marcia Connelly and Katherine Knight.

"Cinematically gorgeous and beautifully crafted, Spring & Arnaud is a breathtakingly tender and intelligent love story"  -  Lynne Fernie, Hot Docs

Yukon SOVA: info@yukonsova.ca     www.yukonsova.ca