Shuvinai Ashoona

×

Expand

Shuvinai Ashoona, “Untitled (Woman Giving Birth to the World),” 2010

Fineliner pen and coloured pencil on paper (collection of John and Joyce Price)

Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona wears high heels when she draws. 

This is one interesting thing I learned at Ashoona’s exhibition, Mapping Worlds, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. 

But there are plenty of other fascinating aspects to her extraordinary work. 

As curator Nancy Campbell explained at the show’s preview, before the gallery's temporary closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ashoona treats her creative process like a job, arriving at 9 a.m. at the Kinngait Studios in the Nunavut community formerly known as Cape Dorset. She draws until 5 p.m., with a break for lunch, and then heads home.  

She works on paper spread across a pillow on her lap and, as Campbell says, she often laughs to herself as she draws.  

Laughter is a natural reaction. Ashoona’s drawings are incredibly beautiful and closely observed, but also funny. Idiosyncratic details fill every corner. Squid monsters attack like whirling dervishes, women give birth to planets, and multi-coloured bears pile atop each other into a mountainous rug pile, much like a Playboy mansion fantasia run amok.

×

Expand

Shuvinai Ashoona, “Bear Mountain,” 2016

Fineliner pen and coloured pencil on paper (collection of Stephanie Comer and Rob Craigie)

Born in Kinngait in 1961, Ashoona comes from a family of artists that includes her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona and cousin Annie Pootoogook.

But her work is uniquely her own, combining the landscape of the North with contemporary influences from horror movies, comic books and satellite TV. 

James Cameron’s Titanic takes a spectacular bow in the show, with a drawing of the doomed ship rearing out of the water like a Leviathan in its death throes, while human figures topple and skid into the ocean below. 

×

Expand

Shuvinai Ashoona, “Composition (Attack of the Tentacle Monsters),” 2015

Fineliner pen and coloured pencil on paper (collection of Paul and Mary Dailey Desmarais III; photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)

In Untitled (Attack of the Tentacle Monsters), brightly coloured squid creatures overwhelm one hapless human, while another cheerfully documents the action with an old-fashioned camera. Campbell says a visit to the Vancouver Aquarium that she made with Ashoona few years back may be related to the appearance of octopuses and squid in the drawings. 

The show, comprised of 36 works from the last two decades, expands Ashoona’s colour palette from earlier black-and-white drawings into explosions of colour. The colour and forms of the tundra rendered in white, black and ochre meet bright purple and acidic orange, all of it fashioned with ordinary tools like pencil crayons and Fineliner pens. 

×

Expand

Shuvinai Ashoona, “Composition (People, Animals and the World Holding Hands),” 2007-08

Fineliner pen and coloured pencil on paper (collection of Edward J. Guarino)

When Ashoona starts a drawing, there’s no blocking out or preplanning. She simply dives in and starts work.

From this stream of consciousness erupts the most unbelievable stuff, never just one story, but multiple narratives, some deeply grounded in traditional culture – hunting, fishing and living on the land – and others seemingly plucked from a distant surreal universe where transformation is ongoing. 

Untitled (Birthing Scene) is a perfect example of the everyday and the deeply surreal coming together in a monster mash of images and ideas. It can take a moment to disentangle and appreciate all the elements the work, including a female figure giving birth to what appears to be a cluster of earths. The woman is supported in her labour by giant seabird that holds one of her electric blue braids out of the way. Flippers, claws and a whale’s tail spiral out from her body, while an infant on the ground gives birth to another, even smaller, baby. There are worlds within worlds, just in this one drawing. 

×

Expand

Shuvinai Ashoona, “Untitled (Birthing Scene),” 2013

Fineliner pen and coloured pencil on paper (collection of Paul and Mary Dailey Desmarais III)

The mark-making and detailed lines of Ashoona’s work remind me of Marking the Infinite, last year’s show of drawings and paintings by women artists from Aboriginal Australia at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. As with them, Ashoona’s work belongs to contemporary practice, a reality honoured by the $50,000 Gershon Iskowitz Prize she received in 2018 from the Art Gallery of Ontario. This show is touring from the Power Plant in Toronto, one of Canada’s prestigious contemporary art venues. 

Ashoona’s personality, sense of optimism and humour radiate out from her works like a broadband signal. It’s easy to feel a surge of joy as the squirrelly little details mount up, creating a boundless universe of the gonzo imaginary. 

Even under attack by giant squid monsters, the people in her drawings don’t seem unduly upset. Most of them, like her bears, seals and birds, have the same funny little smile, as if they’re all part of some massive cosmic joke. And, maybe, they are. ■ 

Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds was scheduled to run at the Vancouver Art Gallery from Feb. 22 to May 24, 2020. Like many other galleries, the Vancouver Art Gallery has closed  indefinitely in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Please check ahead to see if the gallery has reopened.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West  stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.