The Community Arts Council of the Alberni Valley is thrilled to continue our Featured Artist Series, shining a spotlight on one of our remarkable local artists. These profiles appear across our social media, website, and in the newspaper, celebrating the creativity thriving in our community.
This installment highlights Nik Burton, a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans music, theatre, comedy, special effects makeup, and drag, most recognizably in his beloved stage persona, Frida.
Nik’s love of creating started young, inspired by his sister Alee’s artistic talent. His path as a performer took shape at a middle school talent show, where an a cappella rendition of Ella Fitzgerald’s “Paper Moon” caught the attention of the high school music department and landed him a spot in the vocal jazz troupe, eventually earning him the title of Best Male Vocalist in British Columbia at the BC Interior Jazz Festival. Around the same time, he discovered a fascination with liquid latex and monster-making that carried through university and nearly led him to formal training in special effects makeup.
Nik hasn’t had much in the way of formal art training. What he has instead is a wide well of influences: painters like Frida Kahlo, El Greco, and Salvador Dalí, drag icon Jinkx Monsoon, his sister Alee, and his mother Alejandra, who instilled in him a deep love of his Mexican culture. That cultural pride shapes everything he makes, and it’s central to how his full drag name, Frida Kahl Ho, came to be, chosen shortly after performing under an earlier persona to honour his heritage, his love of wordplay, and an artist whose resilience and individuality changed how he saw himself. In 2016, hearing another performer speak about learning to love one small thing about yourself and letting that be the start, Nik found the beginning of his own path toward wholeness. Art, for him, isn’t created from urgency or pressure. It’s created because creation itself is the point.
Across every medium he touches, from drums to painting to monster-making to drag, Nik’s process starts the same way: imagining the finished piece first, then letting the medium, space, or theme shape the road to get there. That same care shows up in his cooking and singing series on YouTube, where getting the recipe or the song exactly right always comes before anything gets filmed.
The West Coast is woven into Nik’s work. He describes a deep pull toward earth, wind, and water, often finding clarity at Centennial Pier when things feel heavy. Growing up surrounded by that landscape, he says, is part of what took the urgency out of his art altogether.
As Frida, Nik has toured the length of Vancouver Island with Vancouver Island Regional Library, bringing music, storytelling, and craft-making to communities big and small. In family and school settings, she appears as the fully family-friendly Miss Frida, work Nik counts among the proudest of his life. He’s also performed and sung with Portal Players Dramatic Society at the Capitol Theatre, notably in a genderbent turn in Little Shop of Horrors, and has helped build space for drag in Port Alberni as one of few performers doing it locally. Beyond the stage, Nik contributes pieces to the newspaper and writes poetry and short stories on his own. Of everything he makes, he says he’s proudest when honouring his culture, especially through cooking, with his Pozole Rojo video standing as his top-performing piece to date.
When asked what advice he would give to emerging artists, Nik shared:
“Embrace discomfort. Carve your own path. Have confidence in your skills. The nerves you experience while creating, or while waiting to create or perform, are the key to the magic in the art. Channel that energy into the performance, and the audience will never forget what you shared.”
Nik is based in Port Alberni, and you can follow Frida’s cooking and singing series on YouTube and Instagram.
