January 22, 2020, Vancouver, BC – The Vancouver Art Gallery presents two noteworthy exhibitions as part of its 2020 spring season line-up. Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds features pencil crayon and ink drawings produced by Shuvinai Ashoona, the celebrated Inuk artist, over the past two decades, on view from February 22 to May 24, 2020. This is Shuvinai Ashoona’s first museum exhibition in Western Canada. lineages and land bases on view from February 22 to May 18, 2020 presents over 80 works including Sophie Frank’s Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) basketry and Emily Carr’s late landscape paintings alongside artworks from the Gallery’s permanent collection made since the 1960s to the present in order to explore ideas of subjectivity and personhood in relation to the natural world.
The exhibition brings together a selection of 36 works on paper produced by Shuvinai Ashoona over the past two decades. Celebrated for her highly personal and imaginative iconography that combines earthly and extraterrestrial realms, Mapping Worlds is a vital representation of this third- generation Inuk artist’s work.
Ashoona’s drawings in ink, graphite and coloured pencils demonstrate her wide-ranging interests in narratives that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, past and future. Influenced by her environment and fed by her fascination with horror films, comic books and television, Ashoona references traditional Inuit iconography from everyday life to the mythic; offering strange and fantastical visions that evoke altered states of mind.
Ashoona’s work speaks to anxieties about the future related to resource extraction and our fears of the unknown, the monstrous and the “other,” yet her artwork does not depict humans in opposition to the otherworldly. Her brightly coloured drawings teem with life, and while the Inuit community occasionally clashes with the artist’s creatures, more often than not they co-exist harmoniously. Ashoona’s work has become a vision for dialogue on the effects of climate change in the northern hemisphere, the role popular culture plays in Arctic communities and the ways in which Inuit art and artists are represented within Canada and abroad.
“Shuvinai Ashoona’s fantastical drawings bridge the reality of life in the North with a boldly imaginative vision,” stated Daina Augaitis, Interim Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “Ashoona is of a generation of artists who have helped to alter expectations of Inuit art. By breaking with forms of representation adopted by previous generations, her works respond to the complicated impact of a century of colonial influence in the Arctic and challenge stereotypes about life in the North.”
Ashoona was born in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, in 1961 and has worked and lived on the southern tip of Baffin Island for most of her life. Although not formally trained as an artist, her drawings are part of a lineage of artistic practice beginning with her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona (1908–1983) and continued by her first cousin Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016). She began drawing in 1996 and was first included in the Cape Dorset annual print collection in 1997. Since then, Ashoona has worked regularly at Kinngait Studios, which was incorporated in 1959 as the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative and is the longest-running art cooperative in the Canadian Arctic.
Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds is organized and circulated by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. The exhibition is curated by Nancy Campbell, PhD, with assistance from Justine Kohleal, Assistant Curator, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. A catalogue will be published by the Power Plant Gallery (tentative release: May 2020).