Glenn Gear b. 1970 Montreal, QC —
Originally from Newfoundland, Montreal-based animator, filmmaker and visual artist Glenn Gear is often inspired by the exploration of his identity as an urban Inuk with ancestral ties to Nunatsiavut. “I find once you’re really embedded in those creative processes, you can uncover so much about yourself,” says Gear, adding that he typically produces content for his community and other Inuit across and outside of Inuit Nunangat. “I’m always grappling with that idea of being on the land and belonging to the land, but also feeling comfortable in the city.”
Speaking with Gear, it is hard to miss the playful energy that is so apparent in much of his work. His recent animation Kablunât: Legend of the Origin of the White
People (2016) draws from a Nunatsiavummiut legend recorded by a Moravian missionary. Making use of archival photographs collected over nearly nine years, Gear reinterprets the legend for a contemporary Inuit audience, while framing the story as a reclamation from colonial retellings. “I wanted to literally insert myself in that narrative, break it apart and see what was there in a kind of dreamlike way,” he notes.
In 2016, at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Gear expanded his practice outward to include installation, creating a piece comprised of two opposing murals, representing the city and the wilderness, respectively, that met on a third wall where his own footage from Nunatsiavut was projected on a circular “portal.” “I think people pass back and forth all the time, so I don’t want to set up an artificial division between ‘the urban’ and ‘the wild’,” he explains. “I think home is always that space in between.” – Emily Henderson