Evening Escapades
Evening Escapades (still), animation, 2024
An Enchanting, Immersive World Awaits with a Debut Exhibition
By Nancy Saunders
The Thunder Bay Art Gallery opens its winter season with Evening Escapades, the debut exhibition from Yukon-based Starlight Sojourn Studios. Artists Darcy Tara McDiarmid and Chantal Russo create an immersive environment where wildlife, traditional knowledge, and dream imagery unfold through four atmospheric films.
McDiarmid and Russo’s collaboration is guided by intuition and shared imagination. McDiarmid says they met just as she had been hoping to find an animator who could help bring movement to her artwork. “I feel like it was serendipity to meet Chantal, and we’re such an amazing team together.”
Starlight Sojourn (still), animation, 2023
Birchbark paintings by McDiarmid are also part of the exhibit, bringing a long-held vision to life for the artists. “I’ve had this idea that it’d be really cool to show our animations with what the animations are built from, and that’s exactly what [Thunder Bay Art Gallery curator] Penelope Smart proposed,” says Russo.
Midnight Migrations (still), animation, 2025
McDiarmid, a Han and Northern Tutchone artist from the crow clan, grounds her work in Indigenous knowledge systems, where stories, laws, and cultural memory are carried through dreamtime and through relationships with the land. “How I do a lot of my art is based on traditional knowledge and also dreaming. […] I feel that I’m helping honour my ancestors by doing the artwork that I see in dreamtime. It connects us directly to our ancestors and our wisdom, and it helps us protect and steward and conserve our land and people resources.”
River Revelations (still), animation, 2024
Russo, who has animated for two decades, deeply values their partnership. “[Darcy] gives me the greatest gift that an artist can give another artist, of letting me work from her paintings, but also change her paintings. [...] I’ll take elements and kind of rework them,” Russo says. “That’s a huge amount of artistic trust, which I’m really honoured by [..]. When Darcy and I talk our animations into being […] I feel like she is sharing some of her dreaming with me in a way which is really magical.”
Russo describes how the land shapes their work through filming outdoors, harvesting local plants to process film, and crafting soundscapes using field recordings. Narration adds another layer of cultural depth, with Elders contributing their voices and guidance. “One of the things we’re trying to do is really create, as much as possible, an immersive environment for the viewer,” says Russo.
At the Thunder Bay Art Gallery from January 9 to March 8, Evening Escapades invites audiences into a world shaped by dreaming and sustained relationships with the living land. In addition to the show, Russo is doing an artist talk on February 19 and will host an animation workshop on February 20.
