Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun
Fazakas Gallery
As the days grow progressively darker in Vancouver, Maureen Gruben’s exhibition, Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun, opens at the Fazakas Gallery, providing visitors with a welcome reminder of the season that falls beyond the Winter Solstice. This exhibition explores a springtime ritual in Gruben’s home community of Tuk tuuyaqtuq (Tuk toyak tuk), Inuvialuit Set tlement Region, NT, featuring a body of work that reflects on generations of families gathering at Husky Lakes to icefish. It celebrates both the temporary, cyclical relief from winter and the return to immemorial practices of Inuvialuit hunting and fishing. Gruben’s mix of industrial and traditional materials, which explore their relation to land and territory, has become a distinctive attribute of her work. This exhibition focuses on qamutiit, goose-feather fishing lures and the ephemera of Ski-Doos to illustrate the individuals and activities set under the springtime sun at Husky Lakes.
A series of photographs by Gruben’s longtime collaborator Kyra Kordoski are collected in a corner; the photographs document Gruben’s installation of 14 borrowed qamutiit in different arrangements on the tundra. One photo sees the qamutiit pulled into a ring with their runners facing outwards like outstretched arms. Another sees the massive sleds standing tall and anchored in the snow, highlighting their distinct dimensions. Time plays a tertiary character or coded aesthetic within these works, as Gruben responds to a tradition integrated into the cyclical nature and return of seasons: the return of families and generations of Inuvialuit to a collective hunting and fishing base. And despite the presumable labour, these photos evoke joyousness and an assurance of communal connectedness.
Looking closely at these portraits, each qamutiik’s characteristics take shape, revealing their utilitarian role: white paint chipping away to reveal the sandy grain of wood, or stretched caribou skins strengthening areas weakened by hard use in the North. These qamutiit are captured without the tools they habitually carry, which elicits a deeper reverence, acknowledging each sled’s longstanding servitude to the family it belongs to. The splintered, worn edges are juxtaposed with recent homemade repairs, indicating continuous usage that spans multiple generations. Through Gruben’s eyes we see that these sleds are more than vehicles for moving fishing supplies; they are modes of passing traditions, knowledge and skills to younger family members. The depiction of these sleds on the tundra honours the monumental presence of their function and how they might serve as a multigenerational tether within families who are raised through tradition upon the land.
Echoing the composition of the panorama of sleds, snowmobile flaps hang on the wall like pennants. These flaps are constructed out of salvaged material: neon rope from ghost nets, discarded snowmobile flaps and beluga vertebrae found on Arctic shores. The formal similarity between these snowmobile flaps and the photographs make these immemorial spring rituals contemporary; the qamutiit present an integral container for the tools and equipment to survive upon the snow while the modern debris of the Ski-Doo asserts a means to cross this terrain.
These flaps are accompanied by a sound piece filling the gallery with creaking footsteps in the snow, Ski-Doo engines igniting and the splash of fishing lines beneath the ice. In conversation with the snowmobile flaps, the audio helps locate
the presence of a community gathering for fishing season but also highlights the Ski-Doo as an essential vehicle for travelling across snowy terrain.
Linking these thematic threads, a newly constructed qamutiik is suspended in air in the centre of the gallery, exposing aluminum beams, supported by a wooden frame and woven with neon green rope. This suspension reminds me of my grandfather’s work shed, filled with hanging hooks for fresh game, tools dangling from walls and ropes looping from the rafters. There is a familiarity to this sled’s position, but it seems out of place suspended in the stark white gallery, considering the worn quality of the well-loved qamutiit in the photographs. The runners of this sled are built of bright, yellow cedar and void of scratches except for the etching of “Moving with joy across the ice” on one runner, and “While my face turns brown from the sun” on the other.
When reflecting on the pieces collected in this exhibition, I consider how this new sled has an entire lifetime ahead of it. It has yet to carve its runners in the snow or hold the generational memories incurred by seasonal usage. It’s unclear if this sled will be put to use in the North, but I hold a quiet hopefulness that it will find its way home by spring and participate in the annual journey to Husky Lakes to serve as a vehicle for families and communities to gather upon the ice.
Moving with joy calls attention to the return of a new season. It centres the resilience of community traditions lighting the way forward for future generations and asserts that Inuvialuit livelihood in northern territories is both persistent and radiant in its embodiment.