Latest news with #RobFoote
CBC
20-05-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Yellowknife city council opts to fill vacant seat with runner-up from 2022 election
Social Sharing Yellowknife city council decided unanimously on Tuesday to ask Rob Foote to fill its vacant council seat. Foote, the territorial manager of inventory and supply chain quality with the Northwest Territories Health and Social Services Authority, ran for city council in the 2022 municipal election, placing ninth for one of eight council seats. With 1,444 votes, Foote lost to eighth-place winner, now-Mayor Ben Hendriksen, by 120 votes. Council has been down a member since Hendriksen gave up his seat on May 5 to become mayor. He was appointed by council to succeed former mayor Rebecca Alty, who resigned following her election as MP for the Northwest Territories in the April 28 federal election. Foote told CBC News on Tuesday that he wasn't surprised council voted to appoint him. "I know that democracy is always at the forefront of their decisions, so going to the next person in line to backfill a vacancy was something I kind of expected them to do anyway," he said. Foote said he plans to accept the job once he gets an offer. Hendriksen said the motion to appoint him is scheduled for the May 26 council meeting. Council had three options for what to do with its empty seat: leave it vacant until the next municipal election on Oct. 19, 2026; hold a byelection; or appoint a new councillor. At a governance and priorities committee meeting on Tuesday, councillors expressed the belief that filling the vacant seat is the democratic thing to do. Coun. Garett Cochrane said council should have an uneven number of members for its votes (nine, including the mayor). He said Foote was the best choice to fill the role because he had the strongest mandate of the unelected candidates in the 2022 municipal election. If Foote declines the job, said Cochrane, council should go to the unelected candidate with the next-most votes, and onward down the line until a 2022 candidate accepts the position. "Our authority and our legal authority is derived through democratic mandates," said Cochrane. "If we appointed anybody else outside of that realm, it would put this council into disrepute and question the very legitimacy of our formation." Coun. Tom McLennan said he preferred appointing a new councillor to holding a byelection because of the staff time necessary for the latter. He also said leaving the seat vacant would deny council an additional perspective while making decisions. Coun. Steve Payne heaped praise on Foote, saying he's known him for years. "He's a very fair individual. He has high morals, high values, and I think that he would be a very good spokesperson for the city," said Payne. Hendriksen said he would make sure Foote got the proper orientation. Council was unlikely to opt for byelection since holding one would take about four months to plan and execute, and would cost between $100,000 and $150,000. During the 2022 municipal campaign, Foote told CBC that he cared about the local economy and wanted Yellowknife to become a leader in research and education, tourism and mine remediation. Councillors make $36,238.05 per year.
Otago Daily Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Art seen: April 24
"Precarious Existence", Jane Siddall and Rob Foote (The Artist's Room) "Precarious Existence" is a joint exhibition by two artists whose disparate styles nonetheless mesh together appealingly. Jane Siddall's impressive animal studies are created with two different media — wildly colourful pencil work, and more gentle, muted acrylic. Near-mirror symmetry plays a role in several of her works, notably the fantasy shelter of the two foxes in "Safe Haven". The wildlife of Africa and the Subcontinent is a major subject of the artist's images, with elephants and leopards inhabiting magic realist worlds of fabric and wallpaper patterns. Where Siddall's works are almost wilful in their kaleidoscope of colour, Rob Foote's work largely takes the opposite tack. Foote's pictures are quiet surrealist works of unbalanced structures and realms created in a soft sepia-toned charcoal. Humour is very much to the fore in several of the pieces, most obviously in Pac-Man-Hat-Tan and in the wry reworking of a famous image of 1920s construction workers, Angry Bird's Eye View . The two series of works gain connection through a small series of paintings of brightly coloured insects by Foote in acrylic on wallpaper. The vibrancy of these works and the patterned backgrounds tie in perfectly with Siddall's vivid animal scenes. Yuki Kihara (Milford Gallery) Yuki Kihara's exploration of personal and colonial history extends in "Presence in Absence" with a series of lenticular images indicating the passage from the past to the future. In the works, we see Kihara's Victorian-era alter-ego, Salome, as she passes through a changing world. We sense her navigation through space and time, and become aware of the changes not only in her existence but also in our own, as well as the ephemeral nature of the individual lifetime. The clever use of lenticular photographs, which shift and shimmer between images as the viewer moves around them, allows us to be aware of this motion through the plane of earthly existence. The photography is excellent and the works are beautifully presented. The figures and trees move within the picture frame, growing and developing as time passes. We sense the presence and the absence as morning turns through afternoon to evening in the scenes. The central work in the display, a single panoramic photograph, brings suggestions of the journey of societies through time. Kihara's Pacific Island heritage is hinted at in props such as the 'ava bowl and the Bible, representative of the traditional and colonial influences which have shaped Pacific society. "Fault Lines" (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) There are times when representation cannot express the intangible or the ineffable. It is at times like these the power of abstract art comes to the fore. In "Fault Lines", the Dunedin Public Art Gallery presents work by several top New Zealand abstractionists whose work has not only confounded expectation but has challenged the very nature of the art object and its relationship with the gallery space. From Julian Dashper and Oliver Perkins' questioning of the nature of the framed image, to the soul-deep hurt of Ralph Hotere's lament for the lost land of Port Chalmers' Observation Point, we are presented with works which require thought on the part of the viewer. These are not easy pieces, but they are worthwhile. Perhaps the most accessible work is the gestural sweep of Gretchen Albrecht's Cardinal , its hemisphere divided into two vibrating fields of colour. The artist's message, of the passage of life, death, and rebirthas told from a Christian perspective, may not be readily evident to a casual glance, but the sheer power of the colour makes this a hypnotic piece. While work by Don Driver and Don Peebles may not have the immediacy of Albrecht's colours, their playful use of found objects within their constructions produces work that delights as it confounds. By James Dignan
