Amy Ball

Yukon Art Prize Artist Spotlight: Critical examinations of space through the senses

Création Territoire Représentation
Individual sitting on a dirt bike with a brick wall behind them

Amy Ball is a multidisciplinary artist from Dawson City, YT. She has a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, and in 2017 she completed a Meisterschülerin at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany before returning to Dawson City, where she was born and raised. A studio technician at the Yukon School of Visual Arts, Ball is also a co-founder of the studio collective Jimmy’s Place and Local Field School, an experimental collaborative project that was developed as a way to form a community between artists during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Individual sitting on a dirt bike with a brick wall behind them
Amy Ball, Without Rule of Law (2018). PHOTO VIVIANA ABELSON / COURTESY THE YUKON PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS.

Social commentary is an important part of Ball’s artistic practice, which includes performance, installation, text, print-making and filmmaking. She questions concepts of masculinity, capitalist infrastructure and, more recently, how physical spaces around the world are coded based on gender. Sound also features prominently in Ball’s work. Whether she’s superimposing her recitations of a prepared text over an installation, as in the exhibition powers (2018), or adding her own sound effects like in her Women (2018) exhibition, she blends sensory experiences with the stories she tells — both fictional and non-fiction.

Writing is likewise an integral part of Ball’s art. Her recent exhibition Energy (2019), which featured five large framed prints, an acrylic window painting, and a looped animation, also incorporated a three-part essay distributed to viewers. In 2018 she published the 72-page graphic novel provenance with Broken Dimanche Press and Kunstverein Göttingen, and in 2020 she curated, edited and designed THE SUN, a satirical take-over of her community’s newspaper.

Ball’s works have been shown internationally, including Video Delight in Glasgow, Scotland (2018); The Binding Problem in Frankfurt, Germany (2017); Pane per poveri in Venice, Italy (2015); and Ný Verk in Reykjavik, Iceland (2013). In 2018 she was awarded the AIR_Frankfurt residence as well as HIAP, the Helsinki International Artist Program. In the summer of 2019, she delivered a master class at the Yukon School of Visual Arts called “We Should All Utopia As Hard As We Can.”

Credit: This video was originally published by Amy Ball on September 10, 2018. COURTESY THE ARTIST.