Kinngait drawings at the McMichael reveal breadth of Inuit art | Canada Voices

There is a work in the current show of drawings from Kinngait at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection that shows a woman with a quill tracing an empty thought bubble on the paper in front of her. In the bubble over her head, she is imaging Sedna, the mermaid figure that she must be about to draw. That’s a high degree of self-referentiality, a witty artistic image of the art-making process itself in a whole section of this show devoted to drawings of people drawing and carving.

By the 1960s, art was so embedded in the community at Cape Dorset, now Kinngait, that making images of art-making was as logical as depicting hunting or playing. This exhibition, Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait, concentrates not on the walruses and owls so beloved in Southern Canada but on human figures. By doing so, Emily Laurent Henderson, the McMichael’s curator of Indigenous art and culture, has created a revelatory exhibition, drawing from the archive of Kinngait drawings and prints that was intrusted to the McMichael by the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in 1990 but only recently digitized. The show is packed with unexpected images that allow viewers to discover a much fuller range of creativity and styles from the community where printmaking was introduced by the government as an economic development project in 1957.

The point, that creating art for southern markets necessarily limited the images Kinngait artists produced, is made right at the start of the show. It juxtaposes a charming 1963 print of a muskox by Kenojuak Ashevak, probably the most famous artist Kinngait produced, with her original drawing: There the muskox is only one figure at the bottom of the paper; the animal is dominated by a four-eyed tusked spirit looming over its head. Similarly, Sheouak Petaulassie’s amusing graphic The Pot Spirits of 1960, showing a conga line of kettles and pots, was based on a drawing that featured many more images dotted around the paper.

The technical challenges of printmaking demanded an editing process that tended to focus on a simple, central image but it was the perceived demands of southern tastes that dictated the subject matter. We mainly know Cape Dorset for images of animals and mythic figures; this show is filled with drawings of people at work and play as well as technology and towns.

It begins with early pencil drawings by Kenojuak and her husband Johnniebo Ashevak, busy all-over compositions featuring animals, humans and metamorphoses of the two. Nearby, there’s a display featuring two of Kenojuak’s seal-skin bags with decorative appliqué, dating to the 1950s and lent by a private collector. The artist who would go on to create distinctive Inuit icons in the form of The Enchanted Owl and The Woman Who Lives in the Sun was initially adapting the patterning she knew from her needlework.

Perhaps the most revealing section of this show is the one devoted to portraiture. It features a large room of work that ranges from detailed illustrations of women in parkas executed in a Western (that is, European) style by such artists as Qavavau Manumie, Aoudla Pudlat and Peter Pitseolak to Ningeeuga Oshuitoq’s bold reduction of a woman’s headdress, face and hair to a mesmerizing black-and-white pattern. Meanwhile, a section on encounters features Kananginak Pootoogook’s realistic depictions (from the 1980s and 1990) of how settler culture intruded into the north. Perhaps because the Inuit art well known here in the south often depicts mythic figures and humans transforming into animals, we don’t associate it with the portraiture of named individuals, but here is a whole community of well-observed characters.

Similarly, drawings such as Etidlooie Etidlooie’s houses and villages or Pudlo Pudlat’s airplanes and helicopters from the 1980s show that the narrative realism that emerged so powerfully from Annie Pootoogook’s work in the 2000s did have precedents – although Pudlat also depicted airplanes turning into birds. The harsher sides of Annie Pootoogook’s art, showing the conflicts and contrasts of modern life in the north and, later, when she was working outside the co-op system, on the streets of Montreal and Ottawa, are not included here – they would postdate the transfer of the archive. (Of course, it’s natural that there are precedents since so many of these artists, as the repeated surnames suggest, represent family lineages.)

Even more unexpected than the portraits are fanciful views of towns and cities which Henderson identifies as a form of Inuit futurism. In an untitled work of 1984-85 Pudlat shows tall buildings and giant biomorphic forms while in the 1970s Etidlooie was producing fantasy cityscapes featuring high-rises and crenellated towers.

Again, a precedent is revealed, this time for the fantastical work of Shuvinai Ashoona, whose large drawings combine realistic images of Nunavut with mythical subjects and imagery drawn from television. The McMichael’s holdings from Kinngait stop in 1990, but a small secondary show at the end of this exhibition is devoted to work made after that date, including several works by Annie Pootoogook and Composition (Hands Drawing) by Ashoona, lent for the show by actors Martha Burns and Paul Gross.

It’s a large coloured drawing, a composite image made up of different hands depicted at different scales but all seen from above. Each one holds a pencil and is drawing, as a powerful tradition continues.

Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection to Aug. 24.