A Man of Many Faces: Karoo Ashevak in 35mm
Karoo Ashevak in 35mm
The IAQ sat down with photographer Pamela Harris, who lived in Talurjuaq in the early 1970s and who remembers Ashevak as a dynamic man and artist.
Though much has been written about his art and meteoric rise to prominence in the early 1970s, little is known about Karoo Ashevak (1940–1974) the man—there are no extant interviews with the artist, few first-hand accounts published and only a handful of photos of him that have been circulated. In tracking down photos for the feature written by Leslie Boyd (on page 26 of this issue), the IAQ interviewed Pamela Harris, a Toronto-based photographer who lived in Talurjuaq (Taloyoak), NU, in the early 1970s and who shared beautiful memories of the artist at work, at play and in New York City.
“I was up in [Talurjuaq] for three weeks in 1972 and three months in 1973—late summer, early fall, going into October. At that point in [Talurjuaq] there were different kinds of housing, but they were all pre-fab. Karoo was living in an older house, what they were calling matchboxes because they were small and rectangular. His wife, Doris, and his children, Larry and Louise, were a lovely family. One of the pictures in my book [Another Way of Being: Photographs of Spence Bay N.W.T. (1976)] is of Doris and Larry.
Karoo, when you watched him work— and I did because I was photographing him— he would be sitting out there in the cold, you know, with oil tanks behind him, working away on a huge piece of whalebone with real focus and concentration. He concentrated intensely on his work. But when he engaged with me, he was flamboyant. He was kind and full of life, and what he made was so interesting.
According to Judy McGrath, he had studied with a shaman who had one eye a little larger than the other, and he loved to recreate that in his pieces. He was so fanciful and had such a totally creative, fun-filled mind. When you look at his pieces, they are full of humour; he loved putting things in [the figures’] mouths and having strings connected to different things. He was so different from [other artists] who would make a beautiful bird or polar bear.
In 1973 I went camping out on the land with Theresa Quaqjuaq and her family. To get there we took a leaky little boat, called a kicker, on the Arctic Ocean. When we were all leaving and heading back to [Talurjuaq], Karoo roared up in a speedier boat, purchased with the money he had made from carvings. I went back with Karoo, and it was a very fast trip! All I remember was that I
It was a shock to me to see his work on display on Madison Avenue with amazing price tags.
felt much safer in the slightly leaky wooden [boat] than with Karoo, because he really liked cutting it and going fast. It was part of his flamboyance. Even if he was on his Ski-Doo, he was going fast.
In early 1973 I went to New York City to photograph Karoo at the opening of his exhibition Karoo Ashevak: Spirits at the American Indian Arts Center. I don’t have any of the photos I took; they all went to Northern Affairs [then the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), now Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC)], or Canadian Arctic Producers or somebody. I don’t even have the negatives. Sadly, the photos are probably all lost.
It was a shock to me to see his work on display on Madison Avenue with amazing price tags. Karoo wasn’t simply a carver; he was an artist, an absolute artist. I think my biggest memory of Karoo in New York City was when we all went up to the top of the Empire State Building. He looked out over all of that cement, all those sterile buildings, and his comment was about the air and how dirty it was.” – Pamela Harris