The Yellowknife Visitor Centre will host Mike Mitchell’s new exhibition, 51 Years in the Biz, from Wednesday this week until mid-February.
The exhibition’s launch party runs from 6-8pm on November 19 and will include free hot dogs for attendees, given Mitchell is known for making wooden hot dogs. (The hot dogs for guests will be edible.)
The show “encompasses my whole career, which is 51 years, only in as much as I’ve been alive for 51 years,” Mitchell said.
“I’ve only been making art for about three or four years, and so it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek career perspective, but it does pull from all the stuff I’ve been making since I started doing this stuff.”
He explained the show will feature a lot of “wood jokes” – sculptures made from salvaged and recycled wood – and stencilled t-shirt slogans.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
There will be 30 to 40 pieces of art on display, including an entire table dedicated to food made out of wood.
“I have a convention that I’ve set for myself, that I don’t paint wood. It’s sacrosanct. So if there’s anything that’s coloured, I need to find it pre-painted. It’s just one of the little limitations I set on myself,” he said.
The exhibition is being curated by the Yellowknife Artist-Run Community Centre, or YK ARCC, a non-profit that supports and exhibits art in the city.
“What is striking about the aesthetics of Mitchell’s work is its immediacy, roughness and practicality,” Jonah Cutler, the show’s guest curator and a YK ARCC board member, was quoted as saying. Lauren Pelc-McArthur is helping Cutler with the curation.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
“Mitchell doesn’t make little windows into a smoothed-over artificial version of the North with parts sourced online,” Cutler continued.
“He is taking what is already here and arranging it in ways that try to get at what it’s really like in Yellowknife.”
Mitchell’s work was also featured at the visitor centre in 2022.
That exhibit, part of the YellowknifeNOW! multi-artist show, included the debut of Mitchell’s hot-dog machine made entirely from wood.
