The Art of Nick Sikkuark: Sculptures & Drawings

Nick Sikkuark is one of Canada’s most creative and imaginative artists. Over the course of a career spanning more than thirty years Sikkuark has produced, with impressive consistency, some of the most original and inventive sculptures ever to come out of the Canadian North.

This exhibition, consisting mostly of works produced within the last two to three years, presents a somewhat different Nick Sikkuark from the one we are used to seeing. There is less of his all-out inventiveness with materials, and the images tend on the whole to be less fantastical. There are a surprising number of more or less “straight” human figures, which, while each are constructed from organic materials such as whalebone, sinew, caribou antler and musk-ox hair, are rather literal in their style of representation when compared with the artist’s more bizarre, and often much larger, mixed-media assemblages of the past. Yet despite their enhanced literalness and relative restraint, the works presented here are by no means tame. On the contrary, some are the arist’s most powerful and meaningful images to date.

The exhibition also includes a number of coloured drawings in an illustrational mode, the first the artist has made in nearly twenty years, if not more. In the 1970s, Sikkuark was commissioned to produce a series of felt-tip pen drawings for reproduction as a set of storybook-like publications. Bold yet delicate, these drawings combined styles ranging from landscape to caricature, and was provided with a short, often humourous, caption or “story”, a format Sikkuark has returned to for the drawings in this exhibition. Often truly fantastical in content, these works on paper, created with coloured pencils, give fresh evidence both of Sikkuark’s impressive versatility and his seemingly inexhaustible imagination.