Itee Pootoogook: Calm Weather

Featuring 25 works produced across a seven-year period, Itee Pootoogook: Calm Weather highlights the acclaimed Inuit artist’s meticulous technique and delicate sensibility, revealing the extensive scope of his expression. Intended as a tribute to the artist and his powerful contributions to contemporary Canadian art, the exhibition includes some of the last drawings Pootoogook made before his death from cancer in 2014. The exhibition encompasses portraits, landscapes, architectural studies, depictions of objects, images of people out on the land and abstractions. Also included is a small suite of drawings depicting dead animals that are among Pootoogook’s most moving and beautiful works. Collectively, these quietly compelling images express a singular vision of modern northern life.

Born in 1951 in Kimmirut, Itee Pootoogook lived most of his life in the nearby community of Cape Dorset (Kinngait) on southern Baffin Island. A member of the artistically talented Pootoogook family, he began making stone carvings in the early 1970s. In 1973 he began experimenting with photography. A series of his snapshots of friends in and around Cape Dorset became the basis for a stop-frame sequence that was included in the National Film Board’s 1973 production Animation From Cape Dorset. Pootoogook started drawing in the mid 1980s, selling his images of life on the land to the West Baffin Eskimo Co-op. Pootoogook’s drawings are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Bank of Montreal and many important private collections in Canada and abroad. Itee Pootoogook died in March 2014.