Annie Pootoogook's"Three Men Playing Cards," from 2002, lacks the barbed social criticisms she is often known for.
COURTESY FEHELEY FINE ARTSUntil very recently, the phrase “Inuit Modern” — applied to art, at least — would seem either an oxymoron or a sales pitch. The casual familiarity most of us dumb southerners have with Inuit art begins and ends with long-standing clichés — soapstone carvings of seal hunters or cartoonish prints of long-plumed owls, available in an array of sizes and colours to suit any home decorator’s needs.
We’ve been luckier in Toronto. A handful of myth-busting exhibitions in recent years have helped bring us up to speed on a culture of artistic production as contemporary as any, whatever the tourist (ahem) “galleries” and airport tchotchke mongers might have us believe.
The Power Plant’s landmark 2006 show, of Annie Pootoogook’s frank drawings of contemporary northern life, marked the first time Canada’s pre-eminent contemporary art venue had held a major show by an Inuit.
In 2009 and 2010, curator Nancy Campbell (who also brought Pootoogook to the Power Plant, for those keeping score) put contemporary Inuit artists alongside prominent urban colleagues for two person-shows at the University of Toronto, rooting our sense of northern art-making in the here and now.
In 2009, the work of Cape Dorset’s Shuvinai Ashoona — a hybrid fantasy-reality world of sea beasts and supply ships, rendered in bright pencil crayon — sat next to Toronto superstar Shary Boyle, whose fantastical worlds proved perfect accompaniment. Last summer, Ed Pien’s cartoonishly grim, claustrophobic drawings surrounded the sculpture of Samonie Toonoo, who had a thing or two to say about contemporary grimness himself. The show was fittingly titled “Scream”).
Now we have “Inuit Modern,” as good a title as any for the group of 175 works from the Samuel and Esther Sarick collection that opens today at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The AGO can be grateful for Campbell’s set-up. The sharp edge of her previous shows, which aggressively placed Inuit culture in the contemporary moment, is notably absent here. Pootoogook is represented by three drawings, tame compared to her blunt depictions of domestic violence and alcoholism. Ditto Ashoona, whose fantasy realms are also absent, replaced by workaday scenes of the contemporary North, such as the emptying of a sewage truck onto tundra.
What “Inuit Modern” lacks in critical content and sheer contemporaneity it makes up for in an effort to be comprehensive. Gerald McMaster, who co-curated the show with Ingo Hessel, has created a linear temporal arc, from first modern moments of Inuit art in the ’40s and ’50s to the present day.
The show is clear-eyed in its history. The first pieces you encounter are exactly the icons you’re likely to find in the gift shop at Pearson: Carvings of seals and hunters in fur-lined parkas, living off the perpetual ice in their eternal noble savagery.
Size matters. McMaster points out that the Inuit were nomadic; hunting ocean mammals on ever-shifting sea ice can have that effect. Traditional art-making was thus compact. The arrival in the late ’40s of such connected activists as James Houston, a southerner who saw in this tiny, heroic work a vast market potential, changed all that. Suddenly, tiny personal totems were being reproduced in vast number and varying sizes, to suit dealers’ needs.
The market-driven influence of Houston — who, to be fair, devoted decades to developing Inuit art, to no small degree to the benefit of the artists and their village co-ops — contributed to a long fallow period of Inuit art production, at least in the greater public. To the myopic southern eye, Inuit culture was flash-frozen. Whether it still existed or not mattered little to southern dealers, as long as the shelves were stocked and tourists happy.
As a consequence, the current moment’s much-heralded leap forward, to Inuit artists representing their actual here and now, seems almost a revolutionary moment. “Inuit Modern” smartly maps out a long, slow evolution in parallel to a dominant commodity trade that sucked up most of the oxygen for years.
The walls of the exhibition track a timeline in Inuit printmaking, from its origins in the mid-’60s through to present day, with landmark social developments emerging at key moments. Subtle shifts in material and technique — pencil crayon, the much-celebrated, prosaic instrument of choice of contemporary stars like Pootoogook and Pitsulak, appears as early as the ’60s — creep in at key times.
Not quite halfway, Pudlo Pudlat’s 1979 fantastical pencil crayon drawing, “Spirit Embracing Settlement,” renders a significant moment — when Inuit people abandoned igloos, skin tents and sod huts to live in government-issue settlement houses. It signaled the end of nomadic wanderings and, more broadly, the full embrace of modernity.
Along came TV and telephones and refrigerators, and then computers and iPods, far from the mythic clichés that the Pootoogooks and Ashoonas would grow up in and eventually capture with equal parts frankness and imagination. All artists should be free to explore such a range of influences.
A generation from now? “Inuit Modern” will no longer be a curatorial conceit. It will just be.
Inuit Modern opens today at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and continues to Oct. 16. Information atwww.ago.net
