Culture Clash: Annie Pootoogook captures Canada’s north-south divide
I found this article and thought that folks in this community might also find it interesting. It is an art review from the CBC on the work of Annie Pootoogook, a contemporary Inuit artist who now has a show in a Toronto gallery for modern art. The article itself is actually a lengthy photoessay, so please check out the original site to see examples of Pootoogook's artwork.
PHOTO ESSAY
Culture Clash: Annie Pootoogook captures Canada’s north-south divide
By David Balzer June 27, 2006
Annie Pootoogook’s new exhibit at Toronto’s Power Plant is a debut in more ways than one. Not only is it her first at a Canadian public gallery, but it’s also the first time the Power Plant, Canada’s pre-eminent venue for contemporary art, has dedicated a major show to an Inuit artist.
That it’s taken the Power Plant some 18 years to welcome someone like Pootoogook says as much about Inuit art’s prominence (or lack thereof) in the Canadian contemporary art scene as it does about the production and promotion of the art itself. Inuit and contemporary art are, at first glance at, strange bedfellows. The former - with its entrenched representations of hunting and fishing, parkas and igloos - continues to adorn the walls of museums, offices, airports, embassies and specialty galleries the world over as a stock symbol of Canada. The latter, constantly in flux and dependent on a volatile, internationally driven market, seems anomalous to the kind of closed, traditional life one associates with Canada’s Far North.
Pootoogook, however, manages to meld both realms. Born in 1969 in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, a hub of the Inuit art world, Pootoogook started drawing only nine years ago, under the auspices of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative - a place that, like most northern co-ops, encourages its members to take up art-making as a source of income. (Art-making is one of the North’s primary economic activities.) Pootoogook builds on a family legacy: her grandmother was Pitseolak Ashoona, one of Canada’s most revered first-generation Inuit draftspeople, and her mother was Napachie Pootoogook, an important West Baffin co-op printmaker.
Napachie and Pitseolak’s influences are readily found in Annie Pootoogook’s work. Both her forebears were chroniclers of their times, and Annie follows suit - diverging from many of her peers, who frequently stick to cliché forms and symbols in order to please southern buyers. Pootoogook’s austere, often humorous pencil-crayon drawings are unflinching; they capture a radically shifting culture, one still tied to custom, yet inundated with southern goods, technology and media (from manufactured boots to portable phones to Jerry Springer).
Nancy Campbell, curator of Pootoogook’s Power Plant show, underlines the work’s function as a window for curious southerners. “I think these drawings are a pretty accurate reflection of a community that’s still very much caught between contemporary life and life on the land,” says Campbell. “It’s not that one is better than the other; they just co-exist. Annie’s art is new - though it looks somewhat the same stylistically as her elders’ - because the times are new. They’ve changed dramatically.”
Holding Boots Pencil, crayon and ink
Pitseolak Drawing with Two Girls on the Bed
Pitseolak Ashoona, Pootoogook’s grandmother, was a true original. Responsible for some 7,000 drawings and a recipient of the Order of Canada, Pitseolak recorded a key transitional period in the history of her people: the mid-20th-century movement of Inuit from camps to permanent settlements or trading posts.
Pootoogook often cites her grandmother’s influence as integral to her practice. When Pitseolak was bedridden during the last years of her life (she passed away in 1983), Pootoogook and her mother visited her often to watch her work. The experience is depicted in this drawing, which shows Pitseolak in profile (her characteristic thick-rimmed glasses clearly visible) next to her two rapt ancestors. Among other things, the picture is a heartfelt symbol of the female tradition in Inuit drawing; Inuit men, for the most part, are associated with sculpting.
In reference to the drawing, Campbell offers the following quote from Pootoogook (whose dealings with southerners are largely facilitated through an Inuktitut/English translator): “I used to go and watch my grandma drawing because I wanted to learn and she was my grandma. Nobody used to watch her. I don’t know why. I wanted to learn so I had to watch her. She used to talk to me and say, ‘I’m drawing because my grandchildren have to eat.’ But she drew a true story, too, about her life. And she used to tell me you should try this when you grow up, if you can.”
Playing Nintendo
Pootoogook’s drawings of domestic interiors do not aim for naturalism. Says Campbell, “A lot of the works are composites, and are made from memory. Annie combines diverse images, objects and events from her everyday life and puts them together. These are not specific scenes; she’s not copying a room.”
Many objects recur throughout Pootoogook’s interiors: clocks and keys are common, as are lights, switches and plugs (which appear in Pitseolak Drawing with Two Girls on the Bed). Playing Nintendo is notable for these things, as well as for its portrayal of the titular act, one so apparently engrossing that the viewer is only privy to the child’s back. The drawing also contains a number of southern objects aside from the television (like the Nike hat). In fact, all three figures interact with a product, the child on the right and the father on the left enjoying (or about to enjoy) Pepsi and some junk food.
Watching George Bush on TV
“There are a lot of TV drawings,” says Campbell, “ones of Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer and George Bush - and of the Iraq war. Annie’s thoughts on the war are completely filtered through what she’s seen on TV - like, she thinks Saddam Hussein can’t be a very good man.”
Pootoogook’s TV drawings demonstrate the profound influence of southern broadcasting on the north - broadcasting that began in 1972 with the Canadian government’s launch of the Anik A1 satellite, which continues to generate criticism for its corrosive effects on Inuit culture. (More than 90 per cent of Arctic households now have televisions). Pootoogook does not editorialize, though her drawings are relatively unusual in their repeated, almost mesmeric acknowledgement of such conditions - and in their clever invitation to southerners to watch northerners watching southerners.
Family Gathering, Whale Meat
This is one of Pootoogook’s more conventional pieces - a vignette that, perhaps, befits the work of Pitseolak or one of her contemporaries as much as it does Annie. Yet a handful of items in the drawing stand as reminders of how the act of whale hunting has changed for Pootoogook’s generation: the figures wear synthetic parkas and boots, drive a motorboat and collect meat pieces in cellophane bags.
Despite these modern elements, Campbell points to the resilience of this tradition, one that remains centred on sharing and socializing. Campbell also points to the dichotomies now present in Inuit food consumption, which are dealt with in Pootoogook’s other drawings (such as Preparing Seal in the Kitchen): seal or whale meat is still eaten on the floor, whereas many other meals are now eaten at a table.
Man Trying to Think
“Annie is not too forthcoming about her work,” says Campbell, “and at times I can only speculate on her intent.” This highly personal approach makes Pootoogook’s drawings extra intriguing: rather than using standard gestures associated with Inuit art, Pootoogook asserts her own voice, inviting a wealth of analyses and guesses.
Man Trying to Think presents such an enigma. Southern viewers, unable to decode Pootoogook’s use of syllabics, might assume the figure (a nod to Rodin?) is contemplating a weighty, philosophical matter. According to Campbell - who in this case managed to get Pootoogook to spill the beans - the man is simply distressed about not being able to pay his electrical bill, which is represented in the top left-hand corner as the other half of a rectangle bearing Nunavut’s flag.
Mother Falling with Child
Pootoogook’s preference for the recondite is not as apparent in her autobiographical forays, astounding considering the hardships she’s undergone: among other things, her parents battled alcoholism, and she weathered an abusive relationship as an adult. Campbell lauds Pootoogook’s brave, direct handling of such experiences. This drawing records Pootoogook’s split from her partner, who is trying to take her child away from her; the abduction, as seen through the mother’s amautik (hood), seems like a sinister rebirth. Squiggly lines above the figures’ heads are obvious signs of distress; they persist in Pootoogook’s work, for instance in Man Trying to Think, and in Hanging, her stirring impression of a friend’s attempted suicide.
Pootoogook treads similar ground here as her ancestors. Napachie Pootoogook’s renowned later drawings, which were assembled for an impressive 2004 show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, uncover a centuries-old gender disparity that still haunts the North. The drawings contain candid examinations of rape and suicide, in addition to Napachie’s own struggle with domestic abuse.
Woman at her Mirror, Playboy Pose
Pootoogook’s reading of female sexuality is playful and, in a sense, wonderfully savvy, no doubt an outgrowth of her increased exposure, via the internet and television, to erotica and pornography. Her Woman at her Mirror, Playboy Pose will inevitably elicit a ponderous giggle or two among southern audiences: the red pumps, coupled with the sparsely furnished room and the bunny on the wall (which, frankly, looks more like a cross between a lamb and a cow), seem to pit the realities of sex against the absurd, elaborate fantasies we build around it.
Campbell doubts the image is proof of Pootoogook’s postfeminism, though she admits that its humour is “intentional,” and that it’s the result of a “romanticism coupled with observation.” Whatever the precise motivation, the drawing makes a strong case for Pootoogook’s powers of irony: in fact, her remote purview likely aided her in honing such a smart, detached sensibility.
Bra
Pootoogook’s drawing of her red bra, replete with a tag betraying her size, may, like Woman at her Mirror, Playboy Pose, aspire to cheekiness. It may also, according to Campbell, have resulted guilelessly from a fairly common exercise at the West Baffin Co-op that encourages beginner artists to isolate and draw objects in their lives. (Other Pootoogook drawings, including one of Pitseolak’s glasses, have similar origins.)
It’s not surprising that an urban art crowd might find such pieces appealing - drawing is a hot commodity on the international circuit, and the more unstudied or outré it seems, the better. One wonders if Pootoogook’s current success - she has been nominated for a 2006 Sobey Award and recently completed the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Programme in Dufftown, Scotland - has anything to do with a perception of her as an outsider artist, an often cynical and exploitative designation that could belittle the legitimacy of her talent.
Campbell is aware of Pootoogook’s potential for outsider notoriety; Pootoogook is, after all, so geographically removed from the rest of the world as to be an outsider by default. But Campbell sees things differently. “I’m not trying to make this work outsider or capitalize on that,” she says. “When I saw these drawings, I knew they belonged at the Power Plant: they’re Canadian and contemporary, compelling and thoughtful. I never once thought, ‘This is so bizarre.’ Annie’s work is not naive, purposely or otherwise. It is what it is, and it happens to be great.”
PHOTO ESSAY
Culture Clash: Annie Pootoogook captures Canada’s north-south divide
By David Balzer June 27, 2006
Annie Pootoogook’s new exhibit at Toronto’s Power Plant is a debut in more ways than one. Not only is it her first at a Canadian public gallery, but it’s also the first time the Power Plant, Canada’s pre-eminent venue for contemporary art, has dedicated a major show to an Inuit artist.
That it’s taken the Power Plant some 18 years to welcome someone like Pootoogook says as much about Inuit art’s prominence (or lack thereof) in the Canadian contemporary art scene as it does about the production and promotion of the art itself. Inuit and contemporary art are, at first glance at, strange bedfellows. The former - with its entrenched representations of hunting and fishing, parkas and igloos - continues to adorn the walls of museums, offices, airports, embassies and specialty galleries the world over as a stock symbol of Canada. The latter, constantly in flux and dependent on a volatile, internationally driven market, seems anomalous to the kind of closed, traditional life one associates with Canada’s Far North.
Pootoogook, however, manages to meld both realms. Born in 1969 in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, a hub of the Inuit art world, Pootoogook started drawing only nine years ago, under the auspices of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative - a place that, like most northern co-ops, encourages its members to take up art-making as a source of income. (Art-making is one of the North’s primary economic activities.) Pootoogook builds on a family legacy: her grandmother was Pitseolak Ashoona, one of Canada’s most revered first-generation Inuit draftspeople, and her mother was Napachie Pootoogook, an important West Baffin co-op printmaker.
Napachie and Pitseolak’s influences are readily found in Annie Pootoogook’s work. Both her forebears were chroniclers of their times, and Annie follows suit - diverging from many of her peers, who frequently stick to cliché forms and symbols in order to please southern buyers. Pootoogook’s austere, often humorous pencil-crayon drawings are unflinching; they capture a radically shifting culture, one still tied to custom, yet inundated with southern goods, technology and media (from manufactured boots to portable phones to Jerry Springer).
Nancy Campbell, curator of Pootoogook’s Power Plant show, underlines the work’s function as a window for curious southerners. “I think these drawings are a pretty accurate reflection of a community that’s still very much caught between contemporary life and life on the land,” says Campbell. “It’s not that one is better than the other; they just co-exist. Annie’s art is new - though it looks somewhat the same stylistically as her elders’ - because the times are new. They’ve changed dramatically.”
Holding Boots Pencil, crayon and ink
Pitseolak Drawing with Two Girls on the Bed
Pitseolak Ashoona, Pootoogook’s grandmother, was a true original. Responsible for some 7,000 drawings and a recipient of the Order of Canada, Pitseolak recorded a key transitional period in the history of her people: the mid-20th-century movement of Inuit from camps to permanent settlements or trading posts.
Pootoogook often cites her grandmother’s influence as integral to her practice. When Pitseolak was bedridden during the last years of her life (she passed away in 1983), Pootoogook and her mother visited her often to watch her work. The experience is depicted in this drawing, which shows Pitseolak in profile (her characteristic thick-rimmed glasses clearly visible) next to her two rapt ancestors. Among other things, the picture is a heartfelt symbol of the female tradition in Inuit drawing; Inuit men, for the most part, are associated with sculpting.
In reference to the drawing, Campbell offers the following quote from Pootoogook (whose dealings with southerners are largely facilitated through an Inuktitut/English translator): “I used to go and watch my grandma drawing because I wanted to learn and she was my grandma. Nobody used to watch her. I don’t know why. I wanted to learn so I had to watch her. She used to talk to me and say, ‘I’m drawing because my grandchildren have to eat.’ But she drew a true story, too, about her life. And she used to tell me you should try this when you grow up, if you can.”
Playing Nintendo
Pootoogook’s drawings of domestic interiors do not aim for naturalism. Says Campbell, “A lot of the works are composites, and are made from memory. Annie combines diverse images, objects and events from her everyday life and puts them together. These are not specific scenes; she’s not copying a room.”
Many objects recur throughout Pootoogook’s interiors: clocks and keys are common, as are lights, switches and plugs (which appear in Pitseolak Drawing with Two Girls on the Bed). Playing Nintendo is notable for these things, as well as for its portrayal of the titular act, one so apparently engrossing that the viewer is only privy to the child’s back. The drawing also contains a number of southern objects aside from the television (like the Nike hat). In fact, all three figures interact with a product, the child on the right and the father on the left enjoying (or about to enjoy) Pepsi and some junk food.
Watching George Bush on TV
“There are a lot of TV drawings,” says Campbell, “ones of Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer and George Bush - and of the Iraq war. Annie’s thoughts on the war are completely filtered through what she’s seen on TV - like, she thinks Saddam Hussein can’t be a very good man.”
Pootoogook’s TV drawings demonstrate the profound influence of southern broadcasting on the north - broadcasting that began in 1972 with the Canadian government’s launch of the Anik A1 satellite, which continues to generate criticism for its corrosive effects on Inuit culture. (More than 90 per cent of Arctic households now have televisions). Pootoogook does not editorialize, though her drawings are relatively unusual in their repeated, almost mesmeric acknowledgement of such conditions - and in their clever invitation to southerners to watch northerners watching southerners.
Family Gathering, Whale Meat
This is one of Pootoogook’s more conventional pieces - a vignette that, perhaps, befits the work of Pitseolak or one of her contemporaries as much as it does Annie. Yet a handful of items in the drawing stand as reminders of how the act of whale hunting has changed for Pootoogook’s generation: the figures wear synthetic parkas and boots, drive a motorboat and collect meat pieces in cellophane bags.
Despite these modern elements, Campbell points to the resilience of this tradition, one that remains centred on sharing and socializing. Campbell also points to the dichotomies now present in Inuit food consumption, which are dealt with in Pootoogook’s other drawings (such as Preparing Seal in the Kitchen): seal or whale meat is still eaten on the floor, whereas many other meals are now eaten at a table.
Man Trying to Think
“Annie is not too forthcoming about her work,” says Campbell, “and at times I can only speculate on her intent.” This highly personal approach makes Pootoogook’s drawings extra intriguing: rather than using standard gestures associated with Inuit art, Pootoogook asserts her own voice, inviting a wealth of analyses and guesses.
Man Trying to Think presents such an enigma. Southern viewers, unable to decode Pootoogook’s use of syllabics, might assume the figure (a nod to Rodin?) is contemplating a weighty, philosophical matter. According to Campbell - who in this case managed to get Pootoogook to spill the beans - the man is simply distressed about not being able to pay his electrical bill, which is represented in the top left-hand corner as the other half of a rectangle bearing Nunavut’s flag.
Mother Falling with Child
Pootoogook’s preference for the recondite is not as apparent in her autobiographical forays, astounding considering the hardships she’s undergone: among other things, her parents battled alcoholism, and she weathered an abusive relationship as an adult. Campbell lauds Pootoogook’s brave, direct handling of such experiences. This drawing records Pootoogook’s split from her partner, who is trying to take her child away from her; the abduction, as seen through the mother’s amautik (hood), seems like a sinister rebirth. Squiggly lines above the figures’ heads are obvious signs of distress; they persist in Pootoogook’s work, for instance in Man Trying to Think, and in Hanging, her stirring impression of a friend’s attempted suicide.
Pootoogook treads similar ground here as her ancestors. Napachie Pootoogook’s renowned later drawings, which were assembled for an impressive 2004 show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, uncover a centuries-old gender disparity that still haunts the North. The drawings contain candid examinations of rape and suicide, in addition to Napachie’s own struggle with domestic abuse.
Woman at her Mirror, Playboy Pose
Pootoogook’s reading of female sexuality is playful and, in a sense, wonderfully savvy, no doubt an outgrowth of her increased exposure, via the internet and television, to erotica and pornography. Her Woman at her Mirror, Playboy Pose will inevitably elicit a ponderous giggle or two among southern audiences: the red pumps, coupled with the sparsely furnished room and the bunny on the wall (which, frankly, looks more like a cross between a lamb and a cow), seem to pit the realities of sex against the absurd, elaborate fantasies we build around it.
Campbell doubts the image is proof of Pootoogook’s postfeminism, though she admits that its humour is “intentional,” and that it’s the result of a “romanticism coupled with observation.” Whatever the precise motivation, the drawing makes a strong case for Pootoogook’s powers of irony: in fact, her remote purview likely aided her in honing such a smart, detached sensibility.
Bra
Pootoogook’s drawing of her red bra, replete with a tag betraying her size, may, like Woman at her Mirror, Playboy Pose, aspire to cheekiness. It may also, according to Campbell, have resulted guilelessly from a fairly common exercise at the West Baffin Co-op that encourages beginner artists to isolate and draw objects in their lives. (Other Pootoogook drawings, including one of Pitseolak’s glasses, have similar origins.)
It’s not surprising that an urban art crowd might find such pieces appealing - drawing is a hot commodity on the international circuit, and the more unstudied or outré it seems, the better. One wonders if Pootoogook’s current success - she has been nominated for a 2006 Sobey Award and recently completed the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Programme in Dufftown, Scotland - has anything to do with a perception of her as an outsider artist, an often cynical and exploitative designation that could belittle the legitimacy of her talent.
Campbell is aware of Pootoogook’s potential for outsider notoriety; Pootoogook is, after all, so geographically removed from the rest of the world as to be an outsider by default. But Campbell sees things differently. “I’m not trying to make this work outsider or capitalize on that,” she says. “When I saw these drawings, I knew they belonged at the Power Plant: they’re Canadian and contemporary, compelling and thoughtful. I never once thought, ‘This is so bizarre.’ Annie’s work is not naive, purposely or otherwise. It is what it is, and it happens to be great.”