Tarralik Duffy

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Tarralik Duffy, “Tea Time,” 2023, digital drawing, (courtesy of the artist)

Mixing up affectionate nostalgia and wry irony, Tarralik Duffy’s new show at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq until March 17, 2024, uses two-dimensional digital drawings and three-dimensional leather works to represent ordinary objects.

The pieces in Gasoline Rainbows, which Duffy created during a recent four-week residency at the gallery, are bright and punchy, and viewers might see riffs on the repeating wallpaper images of Andy Warhol and the soft-sculpture collaborations of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. But if the American Pop Art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s assumed a monolithic material culture―where a Brillo pad was a Brillo pad, whether you were in New York City or Wichita, Kansas―Duffy’s work subversively upends that notion.

A multi-media artist and jewellery designer from Salliq, Nunavut who is currently based in Saskatoon, Duffy understands that images of common 21^st century consumer goods might register differently in Canada’s North. In Duffy’s work, Ski-Doos, camping equipment and processed foods hold a shiny, multi-coloured allure but also make implicit reference to other, absent objects. Duffy looks at pop imagery through an Inuk lens, subtly suggesting alternate histories and re-imagined futures.

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Tarralik Duffy, “Jerry Cans,” 2023, mixed-media soft sculpture, (courtesy of the artist)

The exhibition’s evocative title calls up beauty with a potentially toxic underlay, referencing the prism of colours Duffy remembers seeing in gas puddles on the gravel roads of her childhood. This idea is further explored in the series Jerry Cans. Constructed from leather, these (more or less) life-sized replicas have lost their hard outlines but retain a real sense of heft. Combining Inuktitut words with standard visual warning labels, they come in the familiar colours of black and red, as well as the more unexpected hues of pink and purple. One jerry can seems to be leaking: A pool of dark reflective material has been placed underneath it, the sheen playing with the natural light that funnels into Qaumajuq’s mezzanine gallery.

Another sewn-leather sculptural piece depicts an exuberantly over-sized, slightly lumpy can of Klik luncheon meat, complete with bar code.

In the digital drawings, Duffy uses primary colours and strong graphic outlines to create realistic but slightly altered images of off-road vehicles and camping equipment, combining corporate brand names such as Honda, Bombardier and Coleman with syllabics. In another digital drawing, the familiar packaging of a commercial bubble gum morphs into “Blubber Yum,” as Duffy playfully imagines maktaaq, the traditional Inuk delicacy of whale skin and fat, going global. (She promises a “Hard ‘n Chewy” taste experience.)

A winner of the Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award in 2021, Duffy plays with Pop Art tropes, but her practice has also been formed by influences closer to home, including the work of the late Annie Pootoogook, with its detailed renderings of everyday Arctic life, and her own family heritage. (These connections are indicated by the inclusion in the show of a textile piece by Duffy’s mother, Leonie N. Duffy, and some highly expressive drawings by her eight-year-old son, Anguti.)

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Tarralik Duffy, “China Lily,” 2022, digital drawing, (courtesy of the artist)

The complexities of cultural interchange are seen in Duffy’s black-gold images of China Lily soya sauce, which Duffy remembers as a ubiquitous part of her childhood. They become a kind of Warholian wallpaper that lines the show’s main wall, but the grid pattern also suggests the repeating rows of products on northern Co-op store shelves.

Another work features repeating boxes of Red Rose tea, picked out in dreamy colours of violet, fuchsia and grass-green. Duffy may be using images of a mass-produced corporate product, but she’s conveying something very specific about the North, where a visiting culture encourages family and friends to talk over endless pots of orange pekoe.

This is Pop Art with a very particular provenance. ■

Tarralik Duffy: Gasoline Rainbows is at Winnipeg Art Gallery- Qaumajuq Sept. 22-March 17, 2024

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