Kablusiak

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Kablusiak, “Shed / Untitled Ghost Series,” 2019

archival pigment print, 32” x 48”

Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak takes a low-tech approach to using a ghostly figure in a playful yet sobering narrative at Calgary’s Jarvis Hall Gallery.

A Calgary-based artist and curator, Kablusiak has garnered attention with recent exhibitions, projects and awards, most notably as a finalist in the 2019 Sobey Art Award. 

Kablusiak, who uses non-gendered pronouns, completed an Indigenous curatorial research practicum at the Banff Centre in 2018 and is working with three Inuit curators to create the inaugural exhibition for Winnipeg’s Inuit Art Centre, slated to open in 2020.

As a millennial, Kablusiak represents a new generation of Inuit creators working to break down artistic barriers and overturn traditional conventions by using diverse media, including photography, performance, installation, drawing and sculpture. 

This show, on view until Feb. 29, highlights how adeptly Kablusiak draws attention to the Inuit urban diaspora, as well as issues related to loss and reclamation, using simple yet subversive materials and actions.

A wall-sized vinyl photograph at the rear of the gallery shows a panoramic street view of Inuvik that includes The Roost, a restaurant that serves everything from cheeseburgers to Chinese food. The only work in the show that doesn’t include a ghostly figure, it is displayed across staggered walls. The effect is curious: it feels gratifying when the image moves into alignment, but it's equally jarring when the illusion ruptures. In that moment, the viewer is effectively displaced from this welcoming neighbourhood.

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Kablusiak, “Duck Lake / Untitled Ghost Series,” 2019

archival pigment print, 32” x 48”

This sense of displacement continues with five photographs displayed in white frames, each featuring a figure draped in white fabric. The titles – such as Duck Lake – describe the locales in or around Inuvik. The show’s title, Akunnirun Kuupak, which translates as “along the Mackenzie River,” reinforces the role of cultural and geographic space. 

While the “bed-sheet ghost” is perhaps Halloween’s most clichéd image, in Kablusiak’s photographs this familiar spectre becomes a wry yet haunting device to articulate the artist’s diasporic identity.

In Boot Lake Road, for instance, the protagonist stands on an empty road under a blue sky, the horizontal lines of a distant overpass and various electrical wires. The wind awkwardly buffets the sheet, with its two eyeholes, against the ghost’s body. This gesture, also evidenced in the other photographs, evokes a perplexing mix of tenacity, desolation and loss. It's sorrowful yet also whimsically empowering. This makeshift ghost does not wander aimlessly through the world but rather stakes a claim on the landscape it wilfully haunts.

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Kablusiak, “Boot Lake Road / Untitled Ghost Series,” 2019

archival pigment print, 32” x 48”

Hiding an identity behind a white cloth, while simultaneously making this apparition both tangible and relatable, suggests a person in a state of cultural limbo or invisibility. The costume offers a haunting metaphor for Inuit diaspora, but also empowers Kablusiak to confront viewers while disrupting or challenging the colonial gaze. In this guise, the subject is neither exoticized nor objectified.

The 2018 billboard project Resilience, curated by Lee-Ann Martin for Winnipeg’s non-profit Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, included a 2016 photograph from Kablusiak’s Untitled Ghost Series. Kablusiak wrote at that time of feeling detached from their heritage growing up in Edmonton where “its Inuit population was spread far and wide.” The ghost portraits became a way of visualizing and coming to terms with cultural disconnection. 

These newer works are rooted in those earlier images, and were produced during Kablusiak’s trip to Inuvik as part of the 2018 TD North/South Exchange residency program, the first time they returned to their ancestral territory as an adult. ■

Kablusiak: Akunnirun Kuupak is on view at the Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary from Jan. 30 to Feb. 29, 2020.

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