Inside Yellowknife's fairytale Snowcastle, a photo festival that pictures the North differently

Destination: Art is a series uncovering some of Canada's unique, unexpected and under-the-radar art experiences. With spring in the air, adventure on the mind and many looking to explore more Canada, CBC Arts is adding some new attractions for readers who want to discover the treasures hiding in their own backyard.

In Yellowknife, March 1st is a day of great ceremony. The opening day of the annual Snowcastle begins when our reigning monarch, Anthony Foliot, a.k.a. the Snowking, gives a rousing speech welcoming one and all to the kingdom (dogs, though, are not welcome, lest they yellow the pristine snow). 

The castle, a roughly 12,000-square-foot structure made entirely of snow and ice on the shore of Great Slave Lake, takes the king's hardy crew more than two months to build. When the clock strikes noon, the royal crew finally saws through the arched doorway, and the magic-hungry crowd surges in. 

Surrounded by gleaming medieval towers, snow-sculpted dragons and unicorns, we are all awed children.

It's like a real-life fairytale. The townsfolk have been trapped in the cold and dark for months. In March, the sun returns full force, and they come blinking out into the light. The heaviness of their thoughts is revealed to be a curse of the Earth's axial tilt, and the mood is one of relieved jubilation. Misanthropic woe dispelled! As Proust once wrote, a change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world — and ourselves. 

But good art does that, too. And this year, the castle's "snowcrete" walls do more than fortify our seasonal dispositions. They've also become an ad hoc art gallery, showing an exhibition of photographs that explore the esthetics of other northern locales: Nunavut, Nunatsiavut and Yukon in Canada, but also Siberia, Alaska and the Nordic countries. 

The exhibition, which runs through March 30, is part of the Far North Photo Festival, a biennial Yellowknife showcase that aims to elevate the work of visual storytellers in the circumpolar North, championing northern stories by northern people. 

Co-curators Jane Sunderwald and Ryan Planche have an eye for perspectives that do not rely on cliched regional imagery, like polar bears, inukshuks or cosy cabins nestled in swirling snow. Instead, their selections from the portfolios of 11 different artists and photojournalists were guided by a question: How can the complexity and characteristics of northern life be differently or more variously described? 

With great imagination, it turns out. 

Alaska-based photographer Acacia Johnson's series, Sea Ice Stories, shows scenes from Arctic Bay, Nunavut, where Inuit families hunt, fish and camp on the land. The series is also a depiction of the white-on-white phenomenon, when an overcast sky blurs with the snow-covered ground, and all objects and figures appear to leap out of an ethereal abyss. The tents in one camp are made of bedsheets. Arctic light glows through patterns of cartoon dogs, purple pansies and yellow daffodils. They look like living-room play forts transported to the edge of a frozen sea — northern surrealism at its finest. 

With its focus on women, family and fabric, Sunderwald says the series "is a softly feminine and nurturing portrayal of the North that provides an alternative to male hunting-hero imagery."

Yellowknife photographer Morgan Tsetta also provides an alternative vision. In her series, Held by the Land, she focuses on Dene practices like drying fish and smoking hides. In her images, blood and water gleam in the sunlight. She often centres hands in the frame, she says, to convey the vital and tactile connection to tradition. 

Northern Norwegian photographer Lars Martin Hunstad depicts northern life in a way I've not seen before — with casual irreverence and tongue-in-cheek humour. His use of flash is reminiscent of 1990s youth culture and Vice magazine. A standout in his Land of the Midnight Sun series depicts a girl in a pink parka and ski goggles looking very rock 'n' roll. Another is a portrait of a balding mountain trekker in yellow sportswear. It's taken in such a way that you just know what kind of dude he is — seeking adventure and oneness with nature, in love with moisture-wicking fabrics and gorp. 

"We liked Lars's work because it suggests that the North doesn't always need to take itself so seriously," says Sunderwald. "It has a sort of 'I'd moon you on the bus' vibe. It says that people are sexy here. People are weird."

Ironically, the exhibition challenges idealized or romanticized images of the North from within one of the most romantic and whimsical northern settings in the world. (The castle, as you can imagine, is frequently rented out for weddings.) But the fusion of images with the castle works, because there's really no way around it. The North is a dreamscape. Even mundane moments, like taking out the garbage, feel epic and sublime when the northern lights are dancing directly overhead.

The trick, perhaps, to making good art about the North is to move viewers beyond too-easy sentiment. Regional imagery can be the life and the death of any local art. It can pique curiosity, or it can reduce complicated cultures down to "pretty as a postcard." Maybe it's important to show that there are garbage cans in the North, too?

Alexey Vasilyev is a photographer who documents daily life in the Yakutia region of Siberia. I looked for a long, long time at his photo of a motorboat with a mounted reindeer head as a hood ornament. In the North, people will strap antlers to just about anything. So what makes this image so exquisitely otherworldly? And why, in his photo of figures standing near a street curb, do they look like they are waiting for a bus that will never come? Somehow, Vasilyev achieves such a beautiful despondency in his work. 

As I walk through the icy fortress, I'm reminded that the reason I love our Snowcastle is not for the beauty of its forms — though I love that, too. While there's nothing more life-affirming than the combination of snow turrets and blue sky (blue beckons us into the infinite, Kandinsky said, and white is pregnant with possibility), I mostly love the castle for how regular life looks inside such a fantastical setting. In the parade of flag-waving kids that precedes Snowking's speech, for example, none of them can march in time. Gawky-limbed, reluctant preteens trail awkwardly behind. I love, too, that several members of the castle crew look wind-burned and hungover, and that our king is a grizzled anti-hero with a penchant for iambic heptameter. 

Most of all, I loved it when the freak warm spell of 2019 caused the whole castle to sag and slump into Great Slave Lake. It was the saddest scene in the world. The unicorns and dragons sank into slush and all the townspeople drowned in their own tears. 

In the North, truth merges with fiction. 

Art history is really one long tussle between romanticism and realism, between Enlightenment values and the rejection of them, reason and unreason. Centuries come. Centuries go. Back and forth, to and fro. But in the North, those poles (pardon the pun) don't really work. Here, as evidenced by the bulk of the work in the Far North Photo Festival, there is a syncretism, or merging, of both. Pure white snow, pregnant with possibility, meets dog piss. A Coleman stove, pots and pans, and a sleeve of soda crackers meets the vast unknowable abyss. Not that art history ever took notice of these lands anyway. 

Currently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic artist most famous for the 1817 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Romanticism has been declared timely again. A New York Times critic wrote of his unrivaled ability to turn "one lifeless boulder into a reflection of the soul." 

That's exactly what Alexey Vasilyev does with his motorboat. And, like Friedrich's scenes, Acacia Johnson's tent photos seem imbued with entire philosophies and worldviews. It's such beautiful work — not only timely, but, like the North itself, timeless. 

For those who can't see the show, images can be seen on its Instagram account, @farnorthphotofest.