Alootook Ipellie

Touring show honours the late artist’s sly cartoons, edgy drawings and Inuit-themed stories.

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The ink drawing shows a hip Inuit man with long, sparkly hair, a neat bow tie and a pair of spectacles suitable for Elton John. He's framed by two upright narwhal tusks and his arms are wrapped in a traditional fur parka. He holds a harpoon in one hand and a bloodied knife in the other.

The 2007 drawing is titled The Death of Nomadic Life, the Creeping Emergence of Civilization. The man looks decidedly like the late Inuit artist Alootook Ipellie. Let’s call it a self-portrait that reflects the constant battle Ipellie, along with many Arctic people, faced in the tug-of-war between northern traditions and southern modernity.

The drawing is a key work in a travelling retrospective titled Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border that will be on view from Feb. 27 to April 11 at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg.

It was curated by Sandra Dyck, the director of the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, as well as Christine Lalonde, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and Heather Igloliorte, an independent curator and art historian at Concordia University in Montreal.

You haven’t heard of Ipellie? Don’t be embarrassed. Ipellie was a shy man, definitely not a grand self-promoter of his work, which was anything but shy or subtle.

He is well known in some circles – he has many fans in the North and enjoys cult status among contemporary cartoonists – but mainstream fame eluded him in life. This posthumous tour is trying to correct that.

Ipellie was a Renaissance man prolific in many creative activities. His edgy ink drawings tended to refer to society and Inuit legends, mixing humour, eroticism and pop culture with the macabre. 

He created many sly, often cutting, political cartoons for such publications as Inuit Monthly (renamed Inuit Today) and the Nunatsiaq News. One series of his cartoons is called Ice Box, while another is about a pair of bumbling brothers, Nuna and Vut. 

Ipellie’s stories, poems and essays make him “the most significant Inuit writer of his generation,” according to Michael Kennedy, a former University of Saskatchewan lecturer who specializes in Inuit writing. Some of Ipellie’s poems are included in the show, along with dozens of his political cartoons and other drawings.

Ipellie was born in 1951 at the small hunting camp of Nuvuqquq on Baffin Island, in what is now Nunavut. He was raised in Iqaluit, but from the age of 16, mostly lived in Ottawa.

Initially, he struggled with the southern lifestyle, uncertain what direction to take in his education and career. Alcohol was also a problem. He died in Ottawa of a heart attack in 2007. He was 56. 

There were few exhibitions of Ipellie’s art during his lifetime. Few galleries own his work, the main exception being the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. Ipellie was invited to speak at an arts festival there and made an impression. Subsequently, the gallery purchased 10 of his works. Several are in this travelling show, which opened two years ago in Ottawa before moving to Iqaluit, Hamilton, Canton and now Winnipeg.

Dyck painstakingly tracked down many works in the show from private owners.

“I did a lot of detective work,” says Dyck, who first saw Ipellie’s work in 1993 at a pub in Ottawa.

She was bowled over by his drawings, which had been created for what is widely considered his masterwork, a book of Inuit-themed stories, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, that he both wrote and illustrated. Think of the stories as adult fairy tales. Some are X-rated. 

Seven of the book’s fantasy drawings are in the travelling exhibition. They bear such evocative names as The Woman Who Married a Goose, Public Execution of the Hermaphrodite Shaman, Love Triangle and Trying to Get to Heaven.

In that latter drawing, people hold the edges of a round sealskin blanket to toss a shaman skyward. The narrator of the tale – surely Ipellie himself – joins the scene and he, too, is tossed heavenward, likely for all eternity, so he can poke fun evermore with his mischievous drawings. ■

Alootook Ipellie: Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border is on view from Feb. 27 to April 11 at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg.

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Gallery 1C03

515 Portage Ave, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9

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