A short review of things past is in order, here: the biennial exhibition Ice Follies began in 2004, when Dermot Wilson, then the director and curator of the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, decided to move beyond the parameters of the gallery’s white box, and address the surrounding geography: the fact that the city of North Bay sits adjacent to the large, shallow body of water that is Lake Nipissing, a favourite spot for fishers in search of pike, pickerel and other species that inhabit its waters.

More specifically, Wilson wanted to explore the architecture of the ice (or fishing) shack, which the urge to fish in the lake during its frozen months has spawned (no pun intended). Throughout the winter months when the ice is thick enough to be safe, shacks dot the lake, in some places closely packed together to form what resembles small communities situated above sites where fish prefer to congregate. So, responses to this architecture was at the forefront of the first exhibition with contributions from the likes of Kim Adams, Susan Detwiler, Ernest Daetwyler, and Ivan Jurakic.

At the next iteration of the exhibition in 2006, response to the vernacular architecture of the ice shack began to wane ever so slightly, and participating artists either explored the specifics of the site more directly (eg. Peter van Tiesenhausen’s snow mound far out onto the ice into which he had dug a hole big enough for one person to crawl into and meditatively look out

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