Beyond the Polar Bear
Beyond the Polar Bear
INUIT ART USED TO BE EASY TO SPOT. There was no mistaking a stone sculpture of a polar bear by Pauta Saila or a stonecut print of The Enchanted Owl by Kenojuak Ashevak. These days, however, the lines are pixelated. Inuit art now includes diverse media: collages made with tissue paper, metalwork, even video production. If Kenojuak’s owl represents a glorious past, then an ultra-modern Flower construction by her son, Arnaqu Ashevak, points to the future. Or consider Jutai Toonoo, whose sculptures tackle identity politics and explore his own emotional life alongside those of international heads of state or Muslim women. Modern technology permeates Annie Pootoogook’s drawings of ATMs on Baffin Island or Inuit watching Iraq War coverage on television. Inuit subject matter has moved beyond the polar bear. It now reflects the cross-cultural reality of the contemporary Arctic world, as the glow of CNN eclipses the spirit of the owl.
Pootoogook, for instance, has just finished her first public solo show, at The Power Plant in Toronto. The exhibition presented a selection of recent drawings by the 36-year-old artist from Cape Dorset concurrently with a show by the Berlin-based sculptor Angela Bulloch. Pootoogook was shortlisted for the 2006 Sobey Art Award and was also accepted into the Artists at Glenfiddich residency program in Scotland this year. During the planning stages of the Power Plant exhibition, the curator Nancy Campbell acknowledged that “This will be one of the first times any contemporary art gallery has positioned an emerging contemporary Inuit artist as a Canadian artist…not exclusively for their ethnicity.”
Pootoogook’s artistic career began a mere decade ago. She has chalked up two successful commercial solo shows at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto (in 2003 and 2006) and her graphics are now included in the annual Cape Dorset print releases. Her images are peopled with New directions in contemporary Inuit art 21st-century Inuit who bridge modern and traditional worlds. Children play video games next to fresh-caught seal meat on the living-room floor. An Inuit worker flips through case files in the Social Services office. Raw scenes of domestic or substance abuse flow from the artist’s personal reflections on spirituality, passion and grief.
While Pootoogook’s documentary approach is distinct among her Cape Dorset peers, she did not emerge from a vacuum. Her grandmother was the renowned graphic artist Pitseolak Ashoona, who was part of the vanguard of contemporary Inuit art in the 1960s and achieved celebrity for her descriptive drawings of daily life among the Inuit of her own generation. During Pitseolak’s lifetime, dramatic changes in Arctic life created the conditions that spawned contemporary Inuit art as we know it today. For centuries, Inuit lived in family units that followed the seasons and the paths of animal migration across tundra hunting grounds, but over the course of one generation in the mid-20th century, nomadic camp existence gave way to life in permanent settlements. Prefabricated houses replaced summer skin tents and winter igloos. Inuit settled in larger communities, such as Cape Dorset, where children attended school on a schedule that failed to take into account the changing seasons and where it became understood that hunting could no longer sustain a family in the new wage economy.
Contemporary Canadian Inuit art arose during this period out of a series of government-sponsored economic-development initiatives intended to foster artistic expression and promote financial self-sufficiency. This was art created entirely for an external market (what Inuit refer to as “the South,” meaning anything beyond the Arctic), though it tapped graphic impulses that had infused Inuit culture for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Settlements like Cape Dorset benefited from an influx of imported art supplies and art advisers during the last decades of the 20th century. Sculpting in stone was encouraged, printmaking and textile arts were introduced and the results were marketed to a southern audience. At the top end of the spectrum legendary names emerged, sporting distinctive styles and signature subjects: Kenojuak and her owls, Jessie Oonark’s ulus (the traditional curved cutting knife of Inuit women), the whimsical spirit figures of Karoo Ashevak and Pauta’s energetic dancing bears.
The branding of Inuit art as the outward expression of a romanticized Great White North filled with hunters, igloos and mighty Arctic animals has undoubtedly contributed to the allure and international appeal of this mode of art over the past 50 years. However, the iconic Inuit image of years past is so embedded in the collective psyche that the market can prove resistant to change when presented with non-traditional materials or truly modern subjects. In today’s world, Inuit no longer live in igloos. The modern settlement of Cape Dorset is filled with prefab housing, Ski-Doos and power lines, yet only a handful of Arctic artists depict this reality in their works. When asked, many say that it is easier to sell bears, and it’s hard to argue with such pragmatism.
Although some Inuit now live—at least for periods of time— in southern Canadian cities and have access to a wealth of art supplies, collectors have been slow to embrace the use of nonindigenous materials by Inuit artists. The Ontario-based artist David Ruben Piqtouqun and his brother, Abraham Apakark Anghik, who is based in British Columbia, look for malleable carving materials like soft Brazilian soapstone rather than choosing the hard basalt of their native Paulatuk. Characteristic of Inuit working in southern settings, the brothers have retained close ties to traditional culture through their subject matter even as they embrace contemporary options when it comes to the form and process of their art-making.
Metalwork stretches the comfort boundaries of conventional Inuit-art collectors even further. The Newfoundland-based Michael Massie is one of few art school–trained artists of Inuit heritage, having earned his BFA at NSCAD University. He chooses silver and exotic hardwoods for many of his sinuous creations, fusing classic Inuit imagery with universal musings on preciousness and community. An ongoing series of pseudoteapots addresses the intimate ritual of sharing tea, a daily custom introduced to Arctic residents by travelling European whalers of centuries past. “Michael is a bridge artist,” notes Nigel Reading of Vancouver’s Spirit Wrestler Gallery, which represents Massie. “His work appeals to a varied clientele. It does not fit the natural perception of what Inuit art is, but bridges the gap from Native art to contemporary non-Native art.”
Video production—among the most modern media for contemporary art-making—has also reached the Canadian Arctic. First and foremost among its practitioners is Zacharias Kunuk, whose video art assumes the form of historical drama with an improvisational twist. Kunuk opts for an ultra-modern medium to deliver the messages of traditional oral culture, repackaging dramatizations of an Inuit past for a TV generation. His feature-length film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), from 2000, was the first Canadian Aboriginal-language film to achieve international success, earning a prestigious prize at the CannesFilm Festival and numerous other awards at home and internationally. His other video productions include Qaggiq (Gathering Place) (1989) and the series Nunavut (Our Land) (1994–95); they consist of episodic stories of traditional Inuit people, places and things. With the advent of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and the spread of TV and home video in the Far North, Kunuk’s work is increasingly accessible to budding video artists of the next generation across Nunavut.
Not all contemporary Inuit art employs new media, however. Suvinai Ashoona is a third-generation Cape Dorset artist who creates haunting works on paper, predominantly in black felt pen. The younger Ashoona, who is also a granddaughter of Pitseolak, emerged suddenly in the late 1990s as a promising force in Inuit graphic art. Her place on the map was secured by a 1999 exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, “Three Women, Three Generations,” which showcased a large body of Suvinai’s work together with that of her grandmother and her aunt, Napachie Pootoogook (Annie’s mother).
Ashoona focuses her artistic attention on the landscape—not as a backdrop to scenes of Inuit life, but as a subject unto itself. Her brooding studies of cavernous rock formations blend the emotional and tonal intensity of Piranesi’s Carceri with the visual intrigue of Escher’s surreal staircases. “Her work could just as easily be placed in any contemporary gallery,” points out Melanie Zavediuk of the Inuit Gallery of Vancouver. “The chances are that non-traditional artists like these will have their work viewed by the general public as fine art, without the ethnographic or cultural tag of ‘Inuit.’”
Similarly, Jutai Toonoo works in stone but departs from ethnic expectations by emblazoning his sculptures with passages of text, hand-carved in English for our consideration. One example is a work from 2001 titled Upside/Downside. At first glance, the abstracted face carved into Baffin Island stone looks innocuous; closer inspection, however, reveals the following prose wrapping the surface: “On the downside, when the so called early explorers found what was never lost, they brought with them diseases and their social problems and they have been with us since the qalunat [white men], and we enheirited the social problem…On the upside they brought with them, the toilet.”
Other recent sculptures by Toonoo have offered reflections on the effects of drug use in the North and the fickle nature of the art market. His works regularly tackle issues of isolation, identity (personal or political) and the burden of artistic inspiration. Somewhat of a loner within his home community of Cape Dorset, Toonoo is nevertheless a consistent player on the international Inuit art market. Jutai is “arguably the most important sculptor working in the North today,” asserts Judy Scott Kardosh of Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver, where Toonoo was featured in his first solo exhibition in 2005. “In a variety of direct and indirect ways, his art gives us the clearest reflection of the underlying forces and tensions that continue to shape modern Inuit society.”
Here, then, is the battle cry—or the lament: how can challenging work like Toonoo’s be positioned for a market expecting hunters and polar bears? Cutting-edge contemporary Inuit art is not yet common fare in public galleries; it is the commercial exhibitions that continue to present the vanguard and provide the context essential for such thoroughly modern voices. Only creative marketing and an educated audience will ensure that Toonoo can continue to eloquently speak his mind while making his living as a sculptor.
In Toronto, the art dealer Patricia Feheley of Feheley Fine Arts detects a gradual warming to contemporary Inuit art. “Each year at the Toronto International Art Fair,” she observes, “I’ve noticed increasing interest in David Ruben’s stone and metalwork sculptures, Arnaqu’s constructions, Jutai’s abstractions and inscriptions. These are the types of work garnering attention.” Artists like Toonoo and Pootoogook attract a new audience for Inuit art, but also send a message back to the North that it is feasible to create non-traditional art and still sell. Eventually, Feheley anticipates, “this attitude will filter through the ranks of artists, the co-op systems and intermediary entrepreneurs. That’s why this work is so very key to the future of Inuit art.”
Artists who acknowledge their Inuit heritage but stand firmly in the present straddle two worlds, retaining a traditional tone in subject matter while working in new materials. Others seem immune to preconceptions about what Inuit art should look like, creating work that is both entirely personal and meticulously modern in form. The best stand poised to elude the qualifier of “Inuit” and see their names inscribed in the broader lexicon of Canadian contemporary artists. “Cape Dorset now seems to have a critical mass of talented, individual artists each successfully pursuing their own aesthetic,” points out Feheley.
And so, both in the North and in the South, Pootoogook’s exhibition at The Power Plant has been a sort of divining rod, testing the positioning of contemporary art made by Inuit. But that political overtone is beyond the concern of the artist, who merely works away at what she does best. “When I was growing up,” Pootoogook has recalled, “my mother used to tell me to make stories from the past.” By sidestepping this piece of familial advice, Pootoogook has found her niche, creating art that reflects the modern realities of an Arctic woman living in the global village, with hardly a bear in sight.
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