DIRTY SPRING MOUNTAIN IN MALL PARKING LOT

Colored Pencil/Graphite on paper – 82” x 135”

2026

North Dakota Museum of Art Collections

Dirty Spring Snow Mountain is one of a trilogy of fleeting moments translated to drawing that Kirouac began in 2021. Drawing snow feels like the transcribing of nothing and something solid at once. Although working from a source image she took in 2019, to Kirouac, this work is less about the details photography can afford a realistic drawing and more about the anatomy of natural elements. It is about creating open-ended portals not certainty and engaging the paradox of a long-term commitment to a fugitive instant, knowing full well it would disappear.

It is customary nay necessary for Winnipeg artists to travel away from the isolation of their geography at times and return as Kirouac has done throughout her career. That travel is also translated in her drawing process. This hypnotic and methodical act over months created a weaving of metaphors where the form became an ocean in a storm, patterns of swelling and crashing waves one day, rhythms of muddy switchback trails carving up Rocky Mountains on another and prompted flashes of falling to the base after attempting to claim its highest peak at school recess.

The familiarity of these mountains (by Winnipeg’s standards) of frozen water with black and brown striations grit, sand and salt formed by melting, freezing and the sheer force of bulldozers shoving and piling it aside in parking lots becomes as much a Canadian landscape as any other.