Aubyn O’Grady 
2025 Yukon Prize Recipient
Artist Bio
Aubyn O’Grady is the Program Director of the Yukon School of Visual Arts (Yukon SOVA) in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Territory, Dawson City, Yukon (Canada). Aubyn’s research-creation practice is concerned with artist-led schools, the ethics of site-specific and land-based artworks, and artist engagements with rural places. Her art practice requires frequent and enthusiastic collaborations, and Aubyn can be credited with conceptualizing the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers (2013-2017), the Swimming Lessons Aquatic Lecture series (2017-2018), Local Field School (2020+), and Drawlidays (2019, 2020), a Dawson City-wide portrait exchange. Though her work is rarely meant to travel, documentation of Aubyn’s projects has been featured in exhibitions at the Younger Than Beyonce Gallery (ON, Canada), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (ON, Canada), and the ODD Gallery (YT, Canada). Her work has also been the subject of a documentary: The League of Lady Wrestlers (2018), directed by Amy Siegel.
Artist Statement
I have lived in Dawson city on and off since 2009; I often say that this is a community that has seen me “grow up”. I was a part of the fourth cohort of the Yukon School of Visual Arts Foundation Year Program, and I am now the Program Director of the school. I credit my time as a student at YSOVA with putting me on the path to studying education; the way the Foundation Year Program was delivered had a profound impact on how I understood what the purpose of a school could be. Learning to practice art changed my understanding of how things can be learned, and I learned how valuable it is to be given the space to be curious about many different things. I learned how to make conceptual ideas material, I also learned how to make a sculpture out of a thousand things. After graduating from YSOVA, I became serious about making art and developed a performance and socially engaged art and research practice. I created the League of Lady Wrestlers (LOLW), a large-scale feminist performance art project that was performed in Dawson City and Toronto, with spin-off leagues in Montreal, Victoria, and even Alaska. The goal I set for LOLW events was to bring a diverse audience together in a feminist space, using whatever resources and materials on hand in a spectacular and celebratory manner. The LOLW project lasted five years and was performed by hundreds of wrestlers. It was pivotal in forming the way I approach art in my community.
This year, the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers Archive Project launched with support from the Canada Council. In addition to the creation of an oral history of the league, co-curator Amy Siegel and I were invited to exhibit the archive-in-action at the ODD Gallery. My projects since the LOLW have largely been research-based as I develop the research profile and capacities of Yukon SOVA. However, I do love to take advantage of the many opportunities artists living in Dawson City have to make experimental works. Works have included a participatory film about housing insecurity in the Yukon (CHORDATA 2020), and a film about the instability of the Ice Bridge that freezes and melts with increasing unpredictability each year (BRIDGE, 2018). In collaboration with Hän language teachers in Dawson, I have sewn and created large-scale banners that speak to the themes of camaraderie, motherhood, and mental health in the local women’s hockey league (We Play on Ice, It Makes Our Hearts Happy. I have created a performance piece about poor internet connectivity in Dawson City (CLOUD, 2018), and organized a free roller disco in Keno’s community centre (Keno City Roller Disco, 2019). With these projects, in much the same way that pro-wrestling functions, I aim to suspend viewers’ disbelief so that my audiences can test out other realities and imagine things otherwise.
Photo credit: Evan Rensch
DCLOLW Archive Project Exhibition
Curated by Aubyn O’Grady and Amy Siegel
June 2024, ODD Gallery, Dawson City, Yukon
Photos by Miriam Behman
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Created in 2013 by Aubyn O’Grady in her backyard in Dawson City, Yukon, on Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Territory, the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers (DCLOLW) grew into a beloved annual event where characters like Sour Toe Bo (a pickled human toe), Hurtie Gertie (a tormented can-can dancer), and the Gold Nugget (the biggest nugget ever mined in the Klondike) battled in a wrestling ring made of locally salvaged materials. The DCLOW circulated around a desire to express and subvert the difficult, dirty, and downright dangerous social perceptions of feminist expression. While many of the collective members were artists or curators working in other mediums, the DCLOLW encouraged the participation of people who had no experience with wrestling or performance. The DCLOLW’s intervention into the world of professional wrestling was a political act that circumvents traditional dichotomies of good versus evil, slut versus whore, good girl versus bad girl, even female versus male, allowing wrestlers to respond to a sport and a society that seeks to reduce their lives and experience to stereotypes.
Between 2013-2017 the League of Lady Wrestlers grew in size and ambition, with leagues and performances in Toronto, Montreal, and Victoria, with spin-off projects established in Athens, Georgia (S.E.W.W.) and Fairbanks, Alaska (F.L.O.W.). The league ended in 2017 with one final event: THUNDERDOME, in Dawson City.
To date, the DCLOLW is the largest experimental performance art project to come out of the Yukon, yet its history remains relatively obscure, remembered more as local lore and storytelling than as documentation. There are, however, thousands of photographs, hundreds of character profiles, promotional videos, costume and prop ephemera, and countless stories of wrestlers, their managers, and audience members that have yet to be recorded.Ten years after the first match, the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers Archive Project will maps out the ecosystem created by the DCLOLW, primarily through the development of an exhibition (curated by Aubyn O’Grady and Amy Siegel) and artist publication.
Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers
2013-2017
Photos by Michael Maclean & Alex Hakonson
(Images of DCLOLW performances)
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(Images of DCLOLW performances)
12 Minutes: A Public Sound Sculpture
with Dawson City comedian Diane Dagostin for Shiver Arts Fesitval, (2024)
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Between February 1 and February 4th 2024, we gained 12 minutes of sunshine.
A greeting to mark the sunrise was broadcast from the back of Aubyn’s house (869 8th Avenue) at:
10:57, February 01
10:51, February 02
10:48, February 03
10:45, February 04
(I recorded Diane’s very recognizable voice yelling “Good morning bitches!” for this broadcast)
FROM INSIDE TO OUTSIDE
Film 05:55, 2022
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In June of 2022 I was given the opportunity to participate in the Arctic Circle Residency and Retreat, a dedicated week living at the Eagle Plains Hotel. It was an excellent place to write, there was no internet, 24 hours of daylight, and a constant stream of tourists hoping to continue their drive north to see the Arctic Ocean in Tuktoyuktuk, NWT. A new fibre optic cable was slowly being unravelled up the highway as I travelled, the route marked by bright orange spools. At the Eagle Plains Hotel, there is a marker overlooking the highway that describes the Arctic Circle as an imaginary line circling the globe at 66 °33° North, denoting the point where, on summer solstice, the sun does not set for 24 hours. There are two very distinct outhouses located at 66 °33° North on the Joe and Annie Henry Highway, along with the aforementioned welcome sign, that lets visitors know that in addition to being at the Arctic Circle, they are on Gwich’in Territory. The faded pink outhouses are maintained by the territorial government. The presence of the outhouses, to me, are representative of the Arctic Circle as a repository: for an imaginary and the power it has over a territory in very real ways, and the permission given to tourists to relieve themselves on/at that site. Filmed in one of the outhouses at the Arctic Circle, FROM INSIDE TO OUTSIDE considers the imaginary forces that govern our ideas of being inside of or outside of.
What the H. E. Double Hockey-Sticks
Fabric banners, various sizes
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This banner was initially made to make visible the uncertain future of the Art & Margaret Fry Recreation Centre, which at the time was rumoured to have been condemned, putting the fate of our community’s most beloved winter activity into question. Like the ground beneath the rink the banner letters show signs of melting; they slip and sag a little, not quite what they used to be.
What the H.E. Double Hockey-Sticks was the first in what turned into a series of banners installed at the (still standing) arena entitled (we play on ice, it makes our hearts happy, 2022). In January of 2022 we weren’t able to play hockey together and it was hard. Hockey is the way that a lot of us attend to our deep winter mental health; it makes us sweat, it makes us leave our homes in -40 to socialize. I asked the Dawson City Ice Queens Women’s Hockey League to tell me what hockey means to them and distilled the answers into themes that became motherhood, mental and physical health, friendship, and general Ice Queens shenanigans, which then turned into five additional banners.
I’m grateful to Allison and Georgette who took the time to craft and translate:
Łut käk trʼëdoghor, nidrè sh
(we play on ice, it makes our hearts happy)
What the H.E. Double Hockey-Sticks was purchased in 2023 by the Yukon Permanent Art Collection for the price of a full set of hockey jerseys. The ICE JOCKS hockey jerseys were designed by Amy Ball and me and gifted to the the Klondike Ice Queens hockey league in 2024.
GOLD NUGGET RADIO
Sculpture, poster (cyanotype and risograph), and soundscape, 2022
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Developed as a creative component of my dissertation research, I built a crystal radio set that uses local piece of gold as a receiver. Gold is a highly conductive mineral, which also makes it capable of acting as a receiver; using a copper tuner, gold can latch onto particular AM frequencies, which can then be amplified. The radio was built to receive a soundscape created as an archive of the history and development of the Yukon School of Visual Arts.
As the receiving crystal in my radio, I brought gold into this project as a way to mediate my relationship to the land that I am a settler and guest on as I struggled to adapt the ethics embedded in this place into my own ethical framework. Gold has changed the geological, cultural, social, and political landscapes of Dawson City and continues to impact how Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin citizens can access their culture and heritage through the way it has regulated, divided, and categorised the land. I carry the weight of its history into my crystal radio apparatus. Further, I wanted to intervene on the symbolic value of gold and its tireless pursuit by activating its usefulness on a molecular level, sending waves of stories through its crystalline structure.
The crystal radio set is permanently at YSOVA. I worked with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in artist Jackie Olson to design a copper antenna that is modeled into concentric circles, a tribute to an important Han symbol that is connected to storytelling. In addition to the radio I also created a pull-out poster inspired by the Blueprint for Counter-Education and Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow (1973).The soundscape is held in the YSOVA archive.