The ghost, the dredge, Dawson City and me.

Back in January while I was in Dawson City Yukon, Dan Sokolowski director of the Dawson City Film Festival and part of KIAC challenged me to participate in the One Minute Film Challenge. A project where participants shoot a one minute film with the Super 8 film format with no editing or just in-camera editing. I pointed out that I'm more of any audio artist and that I could record a one minute track in an audio format while I was still there. I also said he could bill it as a movie without a picture. Everyone at the screening would be sitting in the dark anyway so they could conjure up images in their head based on what they were hearing. Dan was cool with all that.

I went back to the residency house studio and started improvising with a jaw harp, my voice and the scrap yard guitar I built to show the 3D lab students at SOVA. Then hit record on the H2 and laid out some tracks live to tape as they used to say. Actually I recorded several versions of the same thing as I tried to squeeze it down to one minute long. When I got home I lifted out a choice but rough track and shipped it via the long wires to Dan.

After listening to it, I titled it The Dredge. I usually let my intuition guide what I do as an artist and sort of think that after spending two weeks immersed in Dawson City in the dead cold of winter, reading about the Gold Rush there, visiting the #4 Dredge preserved up on Bonanza Creek, experiencing a visit from the ghost of Macaulay Residence amongst other things, I captured what was going on inside me with my recording.

The screening of all these one minute productions is on May 1 at the ODD Fellows Hall at 8 pm in Dawson City.

Last days in Dawson City

Bombay Peggy's



Front St. building from behind.



There is still gold to be found in the valleys and mountain streams.



My host, the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture






Home of the Snake Pit.

Scrapyard guitars workshop at SOVA

I gave a workshop at School of Visual Art in Dawson City with the folks from the first year 3D class. The basic idea is to get the students to make guitars(or something like that) out of discarded materials. In three hours I introduced acoustic coupling, some basic mechanics and musical ideas to the group. It was really fun. Everyone finished their project. There was some great visual ideas, unusual juxtapositions and noise.

The Road to El Dorado

That's the title of my audio work submitted to The 8 Fest in Toronto. The festival screenings are coming up at the end of January 2010. When I was invited to participate back in October I had no idea I would be invited to Dawson City to participate in a residency at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture.

Milada, one of The 8 Fest coordinators gave me the theme of 'Golden' of which I could interpret in any way I wanted. So I racked my brain and did some googling and settled on gold fever, evils of capitalism, and popular culture representations of same. I did a mash up with sound sampled from the Price is Right, Goldfinger(the 007 Bond movie soundstrack), The Wizard of Oz and the cartoon The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A fun romp using my soundscape making software.

To make a long story short, I was invited to Dawson City after I delivered the 'The Road to El Dorado'. Dawson City Yukon is the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, an event that brought thousands of gold seekers to the Yukon starting around 1896. The history here is deep with stories of fortunes won and lost all related directly to gold.

Did I conjure up this trip with the creation of the art work?

January heating up

In order to beat the January doom/blues, I like to make myself as busy as possible at this time of the year. The heat is on! Besides a pile of paper work and the total reorganizing of my studio, I have the following to keep me going until February.

i'll be heading to San Jose California for a couple of days to participate in meetings and check out the venue for my future participation in the 2010 01 San Jose Biennial with the theme Build Your Own World. I'm really looking forward and quite exited to be building my work wind coil sound flow as part of Out of the Garage. I can really relate to the themes and everything having to do with this so far has been very good.

On January 16 I'll be helping out with this. Video Pool will be participating in the international celebration of Art's Birthday

The next morning I'll be jumping on a plane and heading to the sub-arctic climes of the Yukon where I'll be participating in the residency program at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture.

At the end of the month my audio piece 'The Road to El Dorado' will be paired up as a soundtrack for a short film at The 8 Fest in Toronto.