Qavavau Manumie: Icons & Constellations

MSG is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Kinngait’s Qavavau Manumie. Qavavau Manumie: Icons & Constellations brings together 20 works on paper. Produced uniformly on black paper, the subdued images capture the range of the artist’s distinctive expression, which blends careful observation and meticulous craftsmanship with a strong sense of the uncanny in the everyday. Included are drawings of people, birds, marine wildlife, abstractions and vast landscapes divided by serpentine waterways.

Manumie’s works on paper combine an immaculate drawing technique with an imaginative vision that draws upon Inuit history and spiritual traditions. The exhibition includes several images in which the principal subject is the northern landscape. A suite of these images presents the vast northern tundra set against a distant horizon. In these works, a river or small creek divides the land into two sections. In one, a narrow white stream snakes back and forth as it meanders out to meet the sea in the distance, giving the image a powerful graphic dimension. In another work, a similar waterway angles straight towards the horizon, the latter’s flat surface punctuated by a series of snow-covered hills. In these images, the artist has rendered the sky in white and light grey tones suggestive of Arctic overcast.

Manumie continues to explore the theme of waterways with a series of four images depicting waterfalls, highlighting the importance of these physical features in the treeless northern landscape. A pair of works portrays rivers or pools of water spilling over rocks. Portraits of ceaseless motion, these images of low waterfalls are frozen moments in time that evoke the primordial northern landscape. A second pair of drawings present dual images of higher waterfalls in which the artist presents narrow vertical bands of falling water dividing the compositions into two symmetrical abstract halves.

Manumie’s interest in portraying various species of northern wildlife is also reflected in the presentation. The exhibition includes two drawings in which birds are the principal subject. These images demonstrate Manumie’s skilful ability to render details such as feathering with both sensitivity and accuracy. In another pair of drawings, the artist visualizes groups of whales within a supernatural framework in which different dimensions or worlds meet and intersect. In one of these works, Orcas dive from one abstractly rendered world into another. In a companion image, a group of bowhead whales similarly traverse domains, emerging out of a gaseous sphere in order to plunge into ocean water below.

Weather and atmospheric events have been a recurring theme in Manumie’s imagery over the years. In a drawing from 2013, Manumie portrays one of these episodes, pictured as a tornado-like form that funnels down to the Earth’s surface, lifting a giant rock or iceberg out of the snow- and ice-covered water. Although there are no fleeing humans present in this image (as there are in other similar works with cataclysmic implications by the artist), Manumie’s drawing nonetheless carries a warning message about nature’s overwhelming power.