Shuvinai Ashoona: Vapourating

The Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Shuvinai Ashoona. Shuvinai Ashoona: Vapourating brings together new and older works on paper produced over a 25-year period. Featuring some of the artist’s first drawings presented alongside images made within the last five years, the exhibition explores the different ways in which Ashoona has remained true to her earliest expressive impulses over the course of her diverse artistic evolution. In addition to drawings on paper, the exhibition includes a new series of large format hand-painted etchings being shown for the first time.

The exhibition’s title, derived from one of the works in the exhibition, is Ashoona’s own term, used here to describe her practice as a way of making of something that is at once material and spiritual. In the works in the exhibition, different worlds mix and collide. Some of the images portray outlandish beings performing various mundane rituals tasks, bringing the fantastical into direct conversation with the everyday. In other works, elements from traditional Inuit culture are blended with imagery drawn from popular culture, raising questions about the complex relationship between Indigenous identity and the influence of colonialism. Many of the works in the exhibition explore a variety of real and imagined gendered forms, inviting a powerful feminist reading.

Shuvinai Ashoona: Vapourating is the artist’s sixth exhibition with MSG. The show is timed to coincide with the opening of Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds, Ashoona’s first institutional exhibition on the West Coast, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from February 22 until May 24. Shuvinai Ashoona is the 2018 recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.