Yukon Riverside Arts Festival
Over 1,100 art enthusiasts crowded the Dawson City waterfront for the 15th Yukon
Riverside Arts Festival in August. The weekend featured live music, guest lectures, artist
talks, exhibitions, public art projects and this year’s popular Artist Demonstration Tent
which provided many opportunities for the audience to try their hand at art making .
The Festival’s annual gallery hop kicked off with the KIAC Members’ show in the
Confluence Gallery at SOVA and culminated in an exhibition of new watercolours by
Rachel Siminovitch at Bombay Peggy’s. In between, throughout the downtown core,
local galleries, businesses, and other public spaces offered 11 exhibitions, including two
very special The Natural & The Manufactured Exhibition openings. The ODD Gallery
hosted an exhibition called One Inch More or Less, by Vancouver artist Kevin Murphy
that explored the Quaker Oats advertising campaign of 1955 that offered up deeds to
one square inch of land in the Klondike accompanying boxes of puffed cereal. Rides
departed from the ODD Gallery to the Dome to view Colin Lyon’s Time Machine for
Abandoned Futures, a futuristic Plexiglas structure with a massive roof top battery that
used an electrolytic cleaning process to restore scavenged artifacts.
Throughout the weekend, the dike area was busy with 10 artists offering demonstrations
in a variety of techniques, 30 musical acts performing on the live music stage, and
20 artists selling their wares in the Art Market. The festivities were supplemented by
kids’ activities, a plethora of artist installations, lectures, performances, the bi-annual
ODD Gallery Art Auction, and the ever popular Drink and Draw.
2015 annual report
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