Camera Obscura Festival | Page 7

Off-Site Projects hOLLY warD anD kevin SChMiDt a.k.a. deSIre MaChIne Desire Machine’s Eye of the Beholder features two cameras obscura that are in dialogue with one another, with the landscape, and with its cultural histories. These two structures, resembling nuggets of pyrite (“fool’s gold”), foreground unearthed gravel – rather than gold – as the material most prominent in the Dawson landscape. At the foot of the prominent Moosehide Slide, Ward’s camera obscura plays into the geological past and how the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in peoples have held that past in their collective memory and mythology over time. By contrast, Schmidt’s camera obscura, set amongst the dredge tailings near the mouth of the Klondike River, speaks to the scarring of the landscape during the stampeders’ search for gold and the ongoing upheavals of the landscape as the dredges zig-zagged across the valley of the Klondike and its tributary creeks. DOug SMarCh Jr. Visitors will enter the darkened space of the Art and Margaret Fry Recration Centre to experience Doug Smarch Jr.’s Harvest. Wearing 3D glasses they will see two wall tents flooded with projected imagery and an illusion of water seemingly flowing across the gravel floor. For Smarch the imagery is, in part, about his ancestral Yukon home and the landscape’s changing history, and, in part, about his personal spiritual q Օ