FALSE FRONT, FALSE FRONTIER
Ink on cotton, 15.5’ x 19’, May 2012
Dawson City, Yukon Territory

False Front, False Frontier is a textile-based monoprint that documents the façade of West’s Boiler Shop in Dawson City, Yukon Territory. In 1896, at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, over 30,000 miners settled in Dawson City, rapidly constructing boomtown buildings with limited materials and resources. Today, many of these structures remain in a distinct state of aging, manipulated by time and the shifting layers of permafrost beneath the soil.

Created  while an artist-in-residence at the at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, this work was produced using the process of frottage (rubbing). Cotton fabric was draped across the building’s facade and ink was applied delicately across its surface to record the worn textures of aged lumber and a distinctive oversized circular saw blade. The resulting monoprint creates an indexical and portable facsimile of the original structure and documents a building in a slow but inevitable decay process.

False Front, False Frontier speaks to impermanence—not only of the built environment and shifting climate, but also of the prospectors who left this region as poor as they arrived. Like the false prominence of a false-front façade, their prosperity was an illusion.

This project was generously supported by Parks Canada and exhibited in Beautiful Illusions, a two-person exhibition curated by Ingrid Jenker at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in 2015.

Thanks to

  • David Rohatensky and Parks Canada, for their enthusiastic support of this project

  • The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, for making this work possible through their Artist in Residence program

  • Karen MacKay, Tim Falconer, Elaine Rohatensky, and others who generously assisted in the printing process

  • Chuck Young—my father—who will meet me anywhere to support my work