SHUVINAI ASHOONA, "Drawings 1993 - 2007," September 29 to November 4, 2007, Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver

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"untitled (Anglican Church)"

Shuvinai Ashoona, "untitled (Anglican Church)," 1995, pen and pencil crayon on paper, 26" x 19.75".

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Shuvinai Ashoona

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"untitled (Anglican Church)"

Shuvinai Ashoona, "untitled (Anglican Church)," 1995, pen and pencil crayon on paper, 26" x 19.75".

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"untitled (landscape)"

Shuvinai Ashoona, "untitled (landscape)," 2003/2004, pen on paper, 20" x 26".

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SHUVINAI ASHOONA, Drawings 1993 - 2007

Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver

September 29 to November 4, 2007

By Ann Rosenberg

I first saw Cape Dorset graphics in a 1963 show and promptly bought Kabawa’s Two Birds, One Duck in which a black duck marched off in a huff, while ptarmigan mates craned their necks in a courtship gesture. The white paper was allusive of an infinite snowy landscape.

Creatures of the Arctic Circle were the most frequent subject. Many prints captured aspects of the traditional way of hunting, fishing, preparing food and of being at home in tents or igloos. Mystical visions of sea spirits and strange animals were also often represented, and bare paper was the only ‘setting’. ‘Naïve’ (typically bird’s-eye-view) perspective was at work in the renderings, but it was not used to suggest the third dimension as it’s perceived, where objects seem to ‘diminish’ in the distance. From the outset in 1958, the mainstay techniques, styles and content of Inuit prints (and drawings) were established and controlled in the Cape Dorset printmakers’ co-op, which was managed by James Houston and other non-natives.

Forty years ago, potential collectors were encouraged to believe that the “Canadian Eskimo” still lived the lifestyle depicted in Robert J. Flaherty’s 1922 filmNanook of the North, and that the people who resided in Cape Dorset had few if any modern conveniences. Though 1960s Cape Dorset was actually a community of prefabs that were wired for electricity, none of the graphics indicated the presence of contemporary dwellings, firearms or consumer goods. Even Pudlo Pudlak, who would be known later for images of telephone lines and airplanes, was not making reference to modernity in 1963. Pitseolak Ashoona (1907-1983), who began her short career as a printmaker that year, remained a traditionalist who “recorded the things we did long ago before there were many White Men” while at the same time creating imaginary creatures and supernatural beings that represented a powerful inner life.

The art shows and catalogues circulated by the West Baffin Island Co-op over the last 50 years have been crucial to the development of southerners’ general comprehension of Inuit Art, even now when they include less traditional, more innovative works. But it is the museums and commercial galleries like Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver and Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto that play the most important roles in educating viewers about art-making in the Far North. They’re exhibiting works by the younger generation of artists who go infinitely beyond Pitseolak and far beyond Pudlo in their revelation of community life, the environment and self.

This ten-year retrospective of Shuvinai Ashoona drawings (co-curated by Judy and Robert Kardosh who direct the Marion Scott Gallery) is a case in point. Shuvinai is one of three gifted grand-daughters of Pitseolak, and in a working life that began in the mid ‘90s she has produced many drawings in different media and quickly moved through a variety of styles and themes. Her work ranges from early ink landscapes of the rocky shores of Cape Dorset, eerie and vaporous, to ominous late-’90s pieces packed with imaginary serpentine tunnels, giant ledges, steps and fantastic, towering ‘sculptures’ rendered in dense black hatching that are as claustrophobic as the earlier drawings were open. Her recent coloured pencil drawings are still strange, but are lighter in mood and address a variety of everyday themes.

Robert Kardosh finds almost every piece disturbing. “They are psychologically charged and obsessively drawn,” he says. He directed my attention to the thousands of hatching lines in the stone structures, the hundreds of pebbles on the ground and the countless blades of grass that swirl in her ‘egg’ pieces. Judy Kardosh showed me a 2004 work she feels sums up the artist’s inner life and compulsions. Within a drawing of a sharpened eraser-topped pencil, Shuvinai portrays herself as being grabbed from behind by a demon-like dog with bared fangs. “There is a touch of madness in what she sees and how she represents things. It endows the art with its unusual point of view and edge.”

For a special vision into Cape Dorset’s contemporary world of modern prefabs, and igloo-like tents, its rocky tundra and landscape, this retrospective exhibition is highly recommended, more so because of the artist’s obsessive technique and odd 3D illusion.

Represented by: Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Feheley Fine Arts, Toronto.