Mining for Goldcam bushThe Canadian North is easily romanticized by someone who has never experienced itfirsthand. Having never traveled more northernly than Dauphin, Manitoba, I am probablyguiltier than most of falling prey to colonial mythologies of the great, untamed hinterlands.And though I confess to an almost total ignorance of the contemporary Yukon, a recentviewing of Allison Hrabluik's,

The Pit Bar, Dawson City

, illuminated the surprising degree towhich I have been indoctrinated into a veritable catalogue of Canadiana kitsch. Nowhere tobe found in her depiction of the town are the prospector-infested saloons, mustachioedmounties, and grizzly bear-wrestling frontierswomen that populate any good fifth-grade historytextbook. Hrabluik exploits and unhinges the viewers' expectations of these sorts of weatherworn clichés, by communicating an intimate personal experience of a segment of acommunity that little resembles the folklore that precedes it.Infamous as the epicentre of the Klondike Gold Rush that witnessed the immigration,(and later, emigration), of upwards of 40,000 largely-European prospectors, Dawson City isnow home to a population of about 2,000 permanent residents – some thirty times fewer thanthe number of people who visit the town annually to partake of the 'adventure' advertised onthe town's website. It seems, by outward appearances, to thrive on a tourist industry thatcapitalizes on the fetishization of, and desire for, an experience of the 'authentic', (andimperial), recent past; another website, banking more explicitly on the necrophiliac impulsesof the average tourist, invites us to, “turn back the pages of time, and experience...[thetown's]...rich living history.” But to whom does this history – living or otherwise – belong, andwho are its inheritors? Hrabluik's mesmerizing 2004 stop-motion animation video, co-presented this summer by Video Pool Media Arts Centre, and Platform Centre for Photographic & Digital Art, tenderly celebrates a burgeoning youth culture that attempts tonegotiate an identity autonomous of Dawson City's much mythologized past.

The Pit Bar, Dawson City

is the third in a body of work that explores the artist'sexperiences of socially isolated locales. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone of prairieextraction, Hrabluik focuses on the individuals situated in these places, and their efforts atnavigating a sense of identity within unorthodox, and sometimes trying scenarios.

LofotenIslands, Norway,

the first in the series, strips away the romance of life in an isolated northerncommunity where geese appear to outnumber people; the second,

Niagara Street, Toronto

,chronicles the minutiae of daily life under the grimly-fluorescent lights of an urban meat-packing plant. In all three there is a process of demystification that cuts through the romanticartifice of places whose realities are, by most, little seen and less understood. But where theearlier works convey a sense of fatigue, (and occasional resignation), at the struggle tonegotiate a connected sense of self when immersed within sometimes bleak environments,

The Pit Bar, Dawson City

recognizes and celebrates

the potential of this equation.The work painstakingly recreates a three minute and fifty second-long extract of anevening at a local bar, where Toronto-based indie rock band The Constantines areperforming. But Hrabluik's meticulous and labour-intensive animation process allows her todeviate from a conventional narrative retelling. She video tapes the venue on site, later usingthe footage to reconstruct a small set of the location. The original video is then played back