Extreme Drawing

At once geographically remote yet part of the globalized culture, today’s generation of Inuit artists combine both traditional and contemporary concerns in their work. This exhibition brings together images on paper by five leading Inuit artists, all of whom exemplify contemporary northern drawing’s marked tendency to push beyond the limits of conventional representation.

The works range from images of the everyday world to dream-like depictions of the unusual and otherworldly.
Highlights of the exhibition include Shuvinai Ashoona’s inexplicable and psychologically charged coloured line drawing of a woman wrapped in a coiling serpent; Qavavau Manumie’s whimsical depiction of miniature people labouring against forces and objects 10 times their normal size; Jutai Toonoo’s neo-cubist composition in which
abstract shapes are combined with native Inuktituk text; and Nick Sikkuark’s delicately textured drawing featuring disembodied heads swirling through the night air like comets. The exhibition also contains several works by the late Arnaqu Ashevak, whose subjects include Arctic landscapes with a surreal edge and images of a truly bizarre nature.