Padloo Samayualie: North & South
Feheley Fine Arts
How does one’s experience of place shift when explored through a series of moments and memories? How does one’s vision of home transform upon a return? The first solo exhibition of emerging artist Padloo Samayualie, titled North & South, brings together a collection of graphic works that juxtapose the artist’s observations of life in her home community of Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU, with those in New York City, the site of her recent artist residency at the Brooklyn Museum. The resulting body of work evokes the sensation of taking a step back to revisit familiar spaces in the same way a tourist might explore unfamiliar places.
With some works rendered from source photographs and others based on imagination and memory, Samayualie’s series of pencil-and-ink drawings measures the vastness of Kinngait against the density of New York City as a means of tracing the similitude between these disparate regions. The artist moves swiftly and fluidly between both sites, deconstructing their architectural anatomies and isolating the objects and infrastructures that make up their urban and rural forms.
At first glance the depicted spaces appear to be devoid of life. No human figures are seen punctuating the landscape of Kinngait. No persons are visibly present amongst the tightly concentrated towers of New York City. And yet, in Samayualie’s drawings these scenes are positively teeming with life and energy. These locales and the objects within them become the living, breathing characters in her story.
In Pipes in New York (2016) Samayualie captures a matrix of water pipes, set against a brick-and-mortar backdrop. Concealed by the skin of the city’s looming towers, these galvanized arteries lace through the metropolis, pumping water through the limbs of the city. In a similar vein, Samayualie’s depictions of the northern landscape— specifically, Waiting for Food (2017) and A Pole – No Life Without It (2017) —foreground Kinngait’s network of utility poles and power lines. A recurring element in Samayualie’s drawings of the North, the electrical wires and cables hum with energy as they feed power to the homes of the hamlet’s residents.
Samayualie’s musings on the symmetry of place are perhaps most pronounced in Bricks and Windows, New York (2016) and Two Doors (2016). In these works the artist surveys the rhythm, repetition and pattern of local architecture by throwing into sharp relief the multi-tonal façade of the Kinngait
co-op and a detail of the red-brick exterior of a New York apartment building. With depictions of windows and doors at the fore of these two scenes, Samayualie invites the viewer into her graphic compositions while signalling that the means of entry have been drawn closed, documented, as they are, from the outside. The artist has created a moment of pause within her work, positioning the viewer as a bystander or sightseer and reminding her audience of their acute spectatorship.
Other works in the series include depictions of a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Alaskan pipe from the Brooklyn Museum; an ATV perched atop a shipping container; a brilliant red house that pierces the stark, white landscape like a beacon in the night; and ceremonial masks—both real and imagined.
When viewed as a collection, Samayualie’s drawings bring into focus the similarities between these northern and southern regions. This body of work is a meditation on the architecture of place, a mature and remarkable study of the ordinary objects and infrastructures that connect and sustain these two divergent communities. Depicted in isolation from the human subject, the objects and spaces in Samayualie’s drawings take on lives of their own. They animate her story about North and South and create a compelling narrative about the traces and symmetries of life between and within these two regions.