Bait / Iqiammigaaq Artspace
With stops in Vancouver, BC, Montreal, QC, and Sackville, NB, this touring exhibition features a series of works by Bowmanvillebased ar tist Couzyn van Heuvelen that address themes of subsistence hunting in Inuit communities. Ahead of the first installation at Artspace in Peterborough, ON, this fall, we hear from Guest Curator Ryan Rice and Director and Curator Jon Lockyer about the project and dialogues surrounding the artist’s first solo show:
Bait / Iqiammigaaq revolves around key pieces of work coming together, beginning with Large Fishing Lure 1 and 2 (2018). All of the works in the exhibition connect to food, to sustenance and to the continuity of material culture in the North. Also included is Nets (2018), which was a site-specific installation in Fort Qu’Appelle, SK, reimagined within the gallery space. Van Heuvelen is also creating a new piece, a marble qamutiik, a light weight object that he is turning into a monument. It makes a statement that culture is permanent, to some extent, but also mobilized. He is playing with these objects—with technologies of survival—and transforming them. They all become something else while maintaining their relationship to what they actually are. The premise of the exhibition is to draw attention to van Heuvelen’s unique interpretation of significant fishing and hunting implements, inviting us to witness the scale of his transformation of these functional objects outside of the cultural spaces to which they have been relegated. – Ryan Rice
As an artist-run centre and as a regional centre, it is rare for audiences in our community to see the work of Inuit artists— particularly contemporary Inuit artists. Bait /
Iqiammigaaq was proposed by Ryan Rice, with Couzyn van Heuvelen as the natural choice to lead it. His work is part of a larger ongoing dialogue that we have tried to shape here at the gallery around the practices of Indigenous artists throughout North America. In a very broad way, we are interrogating issues of subsistence hunting and harvesting, land use, treaty rights and cultural practices. I think that the pieces van Heuvelen is presenting will bring that forward for viewers to engage with. Ultimately, it is our hope that visitors will find something in this exhibition that we never anticipated them seeing and that they will be able to carry away.