FEATURE ARTS
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Banner Summer in Fernie
This summer, discover the diversity of Fernie’s arts community through the Fernie Banner Project...
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Troy Cook - Artist
If you ask artist "Big Bubba" Cook why he drives monster coal trucks for Elk Valley mines, he may tell you it has to do with breaking the rules.
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Carlos Del Junco
The evening of Wednesday, February 5 was an evening like many others for 4900 of Fernie's residents, with the usual night-time rituals and activities: some watched movies...
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As the Wheel Turns
A bunch of cracked pots are gathered in the basement of the Fernie Arts Station. There are also plenty of uncracked pots, vases, cups, dioramas, bowls and other assorted treasures...
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Henry Georgi
Looking through the viewfinder of his camera, Henri Georgi is motionless, transfixed by the scene before him...
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Angela Morgan
In the summer of 2000, painter Angela Morgan and husband Brendan made what she calls a "whimsical decision" and chose Fernie as their new home...
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Terry Parker
During a 10-year career as a wildlife photographer, Terry Parker has learned how to stand his ground...
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BANNER SUMMER IN FERNIE
By: Pierre Alleyn
June 24th, 2005
This summer, discover the diversity of Fernie’s arts community through the Fernie Banner Project.
Victoria Avenue lamp-posts, in the Historic Downtown, are now festooned with colourful banners, each the work of one of 30 participating artists. Rest assured that Fernie, blessed with heaps of scenery, wildlife, and history, is home to more artists than there are lamp-posts. Consequently, others will participate next year – and the enchantment will carry on for two or more years.
Many Fernie artists developed their talents in large markets like Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa, and then moved here to form a vibrant artistic community. They choose to work and play here, to start and raise families here, to retire here. Many live in authentic Fernie miner’s houses, lovingly restored into comfortable, well lit, studio and living spaces.
Yes, Fernie is an artist’s dream come true.
We asked Fernie artists Jason Dunham (sculptor), Stephanie Rogers (Glass Artist), and Melanie MacVoy (painter), to tell us a bit about themselves:
Jason Dunham travelled to Fernie from Ontario for a summer job, and found a community where his talents as a metal and stone sculptor could flourish.
 Through stone received while at Whitby’s Stone and Masonry Restoration Guild, and metal found in old homes, Dunham focuses on the discovery of self and the vagaries of love. He produces playful, lustrous, and sensuous Brazilian soapstone works, of which “Sphere Study #1” is a fine example.
(Photo by Pierre Alleyn: Soapstone by Jason Dunham)
The move to Fernie inspired “Reforming”, an intricate and poignant metal and wax sculpture of a person tearing himself from a metal-girded humanoid pupae. The net effect clearly is that of one’s metamorphosis into being.
 “The Source of My Tear", a hanging metal sculpture, received the ‘Columbia Basin’s Best’ award for 2005. Dunham is definitely on a roll this summer.
Stephanie Rogers’ love affair with glass dates back to 1975. Rogers honed her craft in Ottawa’s commercial studios before moving to Fernie in 1991. Like others, she was drawn here by the mountains and instantly felt at home.
(Photo by Kevin McIsaac: Stained glass by Stephanie Rogers)
Rogers likes to meld her ideas with those of her clients – the results are colourful one-of-a-kind stained glass panels that warm the rooms they are installed in. She does a brisk trade in her signature landscape line of sandblasted glassware – which Rogers will blast right before you.
This summer, Rogers will make a custom table, blasting a Haida-style orca onto a large glass-topped whale’s vertebra.
Many Fernie businesses feature doors and decorative plate glass panels by Rogers. Keep an eye out as you explore town and you will notice their eye-pleasing forms.
Melanie MacVoy, dwarfed by a freshly painted 6-foot tall canvas of a giant cedar tree, recalls how a tree planting road-trip brought her within sight of Fernie’s Three Sisters mountain. And how she immediately started figuring out ways to make a living here.
 A fortuitous invitation to paint the coastal cedars of the Stoltmann Wilderness opened up “a whole new source of energy, and a new audience for my work.” Then in 2000 came a job at Island Lake Lodge, way up the Lizard Range among Fernie’s giant cedars.
MacVoy’s walks among these giants now inform much of her work. Entranced by their massive spiralling forms, she produces dizzying acrylic canvasses that truly capture these trees’ power and presence. Purchase a MacVoy canvass or hike the lodge’s cedar grove, and you too can feel the energy.
(Photo by Kevin McIsaac: Acrylic on canvass by Melanie MacVoy)
You are invited to stroll downtown, over our newly widened and resurfaced sidewalks, and see for yourself the breadth of talent that calls Fernie home. Drop into the various Historic Downtown shops, galleries, and The Arts Station itself – and perhaps something will catch your eye or your soul. Works of all kinds–paintings, sculptures, pottery, glassware, fibre arts, jewellery–are to be found in our revitalized downtown.
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