Ancient culture carried forward
AGO exhibition of Inuit artists reminds us of a small community’s huge artistic impact
On a bright and sunny evening this June, the slowly thawing carcass of a seal lay on the floor of Walker Court, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s central and most public hub. A group of Inuit carved carefully into its pale hide, revealing the dark crimson meat below, and distributed it piece by piece to the large, slightly-apprehensive crowd that waited all around. Theo cc a- sion was an art opening, the likes of the gallery has hosted hundreds of times. But never, perhaps, quite like this.
Upstairs in its Zacks Pavilion, the largest and most ceremonious of its gallery spaces typically proffered to host such international luminaries as Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso and Ai Weiwei, was Tunirrusiangit, an exhibition of dozens of works by the Inuit artists Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak.
The show, like the seal, was an outward signal of something different, something new: A centre-stage treatment for Indigenous art and culture in the museum’s most hallowed space. This comes not from nowhere: The past several years have seen a burgeoning priority on Indigenous art in Canadian museums and galleries from coast to coast, an effort to knit together cultural expression from both sides of the colonial divide into a more holistic national project. The AGO, for its part, has been at the forefront of such efforts, installing Wanda Nanibush as is first curator of Indigenous art in 2016. Its Canadian galleries had already displayed an interwoven narrative, Indigenous and not, for years.
Nonetheless, if there’s even been so significant a display of Indigenous art here, and so outward a star-making effort as Tunirrusiangit, I haven’t seen it. It does more work than any exhibition in recent memory, but carries its freight with no signs of strain. Tunirrusiangit, firstly, is a memorial exhibition for Pitsiulak, the brilliant and prolific Cape Dorset artist whose tragic death in late 2016 from pneumonia still serves as damning exemplar of how under-resourced northern communities remain (had a proper hospital been closer at hand, he likely would have survived). But it’s also a link between generations — Ashevak, now deceased, was his aunt and a star in her own right — that helps underscore both the tiny community’s status as an artistic powerhouse, and the power of community that has allowed it to thrive.
That’s a lot to ask of any art exhibition, but Tunirrusiangit performs admirably with an understated, clear-eyed grace. An exhibition largely of the two artists’ remarkably gorgeous drawings, it begins with an atmospheric stage-setter: artist and exhibition co-curator Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s Silaup Putunga, a video projection of the blinding, icy flatness of the far-north, an unearthly howl intermingling with the groaning wind. The sound infuses the rest of the exhibition, bringing life to the still images on the walls.
“Southerners may see it as a void,” Bathory says, looking at the icy, wind-whipped landscape in the work. “But there’s a richness to the landscape that’s invisible to them. That’s that history of racism and colonialism in this country — there’s this stereotype of a barren and solitary land. But everything is so full of colour and life.”
A few steps away and into the work of Ashevak, that’s borne out. Her most famous work, The Enchanted Owl, a manyplumed creature shifting colour left to right from red to black, serves almost as an Inuit art meme, viral as any in its canon, and one you’ll surely know on sight. Tunirrusiangit broadens the frame with an array of prints and drawings alive with vibrant hues — a fish trailing bobbers of red, blue and green, a bird startling in vibrant hues of fuchsia and gold.
Ashevak was born in 1927 and raised on the land, moving from summer to winter camps in tents or qarmaq, sod houses made from stone, whale bone and earth. That was before government housing became the dominant form of dwelling through the 1950s and ’60s as the federal Department of Resources and Development took over responsibility for administration of the North and the people living there, bringing their nomadic lifestyle largely to a halt. With the feds came James Houston, an artist who, in 1951, established the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now Kinngait Studios) in Cape Dorset as a production centre for Inuit art to be sold in the south. Artists like Ashevak, who had been creating works with materials at hand (she sewed, largely, Bathory said) were handed paper and pencil for the first time, and an industry was born.
Ashevak drew scenes of the everyday; her early graphite drawings include hunting scenes, or moving camp from summer to winter. Just as early, thought and fantasy intrude. Creatures intertwine with myth: Sun Owl, from 1963, presents a creature with fiery plumes, unstuck from reality; Drawing for Bird Fantasy print, 1958-59, has multiple heads, plumes and wings, bursting in all directions.
It seems to point to Ashevak shoved from one to the other (her personal history suggests a violent transition: Her father, a shaman, was murdered by Inuit who had converted to Christianity). In her way, she pushed back, holding fast to her cultural identity in her works, which she laced with subtle signals of resilience.
One piece, 1992’s Creation of Nunavut, an Inuit cosmology depicting its six seasons in a rondelle, suggests both perpetual endurance and a stand taken: Made as preparations for Nunavut as a territory were finalized in 1993 (though it wasn’t made official until 1999), “it was a political statement — that we wanted a place in determining our own future,” Bathory said. “Kenojuak was such a force. Outsiders don’t necessarily understand her, or how much of a source of inspiration she is for us.”
With these ideas surely infused in his mind, Pitsiulak first picked up a pencil some decades later, and it’s into his world we cross through a narrow passageway accompanied with the din of heavy machinery. And so the exhibition is cleaved neatly in two — Ashevak first, Pitsiulak second — and I wondered for a moment if there might be some insights to be gleaned to presenting the two artists interwoven, as though engaged in the conversation they enjoyed, auntie to nephew, for so many years.
But walking through Pitsiulak’s portion of the exhibition, the line is clear. Where Ashevak lived through her world in rough transition, Pitsiulak’s was one in which balance started to be redrawn.
Best known for his frank images of everyday life — heavy machinery being transported by barge, an enormous Canadrill used to carve holes in the frozen rock for house pilings, Pitsiulak was committed to core elements of Inuit life: The hunt, with his images of flayed walrus carcasses staining snow with blood, or a freshly killed bowhead whale being ferried ashore alongside kayaks. (One piece, of snowmobiles silhouetted on the ice under a luminous sky at sunset, fuses the artist’s plainspokenness with his impish humour; he called it Morning Commute.)
But Tunirrusiangit also brims with Pitsiulak’s lively scenes of fantasy and mythology drawn from the Inuit’s 4,000-year history in the North. Qalupalik Maqgoo, from 2012, depicts the undersea creature of childhood legend parents used to keep children from wandering onto the ice; in the story, the Qalupalik would drag children down into the icy sea to keep them for their own — a terror Pitsiulak creates with chilling aplomb, his olive-green pencils crafting serpentine arms on black paper, reaching up towards flailing children’s legs on the surface. Another remarkable piece called, simply, From the Past (2015) shows a bowhead — a creature of huge ceremonial significance to the Inuit, to say nothing of the tons of meat its annual hunt delivers — carrying the full arc of Inuit history inside its giant form: its people, their land, their stories, their lives.
There is, in fact, so much here, it serves to heighten the tragedy of Pitsiulak’s untimely end. Astonishingly prolific and inventive, his prodigious talent made it possible for him to do virtually anything. His towering 2012 piece Swimming with Giants is surely a showstopper, the fluid outlines of bowhead and beluga whales seeming almost to be in motion before your eyes. But he was experimenting to the last. Some of his final drawings were made using an underwater GoPro camera, one venture producing a meeting between a seal and a bowhead just underfoot below the ice. He was exploring new technique, too — in that image, the contour of the seal was made by gently rubbing colour away from his surface, not adding to it — revealing a growing technical mastery that surely would have lead to ever more masterful pieces. What Pitsiulak leaves behind, aside from a body of incomparably beautiful, accomplished works, is, like his aunt, a legacy of innovation and staunch commitment to an ancient culture, proving them not to be mutually exclusive. With this display, the AGO makes clear that it agrees. That’s progress.
The exhibition begins with a video projection of the far-north. The sound infuses the rest of the exhibition, bringing life to the still images on the walls
Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario until Aug. 12. Murray Whyte’s Twitter: @untitledtoronto