Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds

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Shuvinai Ashoona, "Composition (Attack of the Tentacle Monsters)," 2015

coloured pencil and ink on paper (collection of Paul and Mary Dailey Desmarais Ill)

 In light of recent developments and our responsibility to help slow the spread and impact of COVID-19 across our communities, we have decided to close the Gallery to the public effective today, Monday, March 16 at 5:00 pm until further notice. This closure includes all exhibitions, programs, events, rentals, 1931 Gallery Bistro, the Gallery Store and Art Rental and Sales. The Art Auction Gala scheduled for May 30 is postponed.

Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds is making its debut in Western Canada featuring pencil crayon and ink drawings produced by Shuvinai Ashoona, the celebrated Inuk artist, over the past two decades.

The exhibition brings together a selection of 36 works on paper produced by Shuvinai Ashoona over the past two decades. Celebrated for her highly personal and imaginative iconography that combines earthly and extraterrestrial realms, Mapping Worlds is a vital representation of this third-generation Inuk artist’s work.

Ashoona’s drawings in ink, graphite and coloured pencils demonstrate her wide-ranging interests in narratives that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, past and future. Influenced by her environment and fed by her fascination with horror films, comic books and television, Ashoona references traditional Inuit iconography from everyday life to the mythic; offering strange and fantastical visions that evoke altered states of mind.

Ashoona’s work speaks to anxieties about the future related to resource extraction and our fears of the unknown, the monstrous and the “other,” yet her artwork does not depict humans in opposition to the otherworldly. Her brightly coloured drawings teem with life, and while the Inuit community occasionally clashes with the artist’s creatures, more often than not they co-exist harmoniously. Ashoona’s work has become a vision for dialogue on the effects of climate change in the northern hemisphere, the role popular culture plays in Arctic communities and the ways in which Inuit art and artists are represented within Canada and abroad.

“Shuvinai Ashoona’s fantastical drawings bridge the reality of life in the North with a boldly imaginative vision,” stated Daina Augaitis, Interim Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “Ashoona is of a generation of artists who have helped to alter expectations of Inuit art. By breaking with forms of representation adopted by previous generations, her works respond to the complicated impact of a century of colonial influence in the Arctic and challenge stereotypes about life in the North.” 

Ashoona was born in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, in 1961 and has worked and lived on the southern tip of Baffin Island for most of her life. Although not formally trained as an artist, her drawings are part of a lineage of artistic practice beginning with her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona (1908–1983) and continued by her first cousin Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016). She began drawing in 1996 and was first included in the Cape Dorset annual print collection in 1997. Since then, Ashoona has worked regularly at Kinngait Studios, which was incorporated in 1959 as the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative and is the longest-running art cooperative in the Canadian Arctic.

Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds is organized and circulated by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. The exhibition is curated by Nancy Campbell, PhD, with assistance from Justine Kohleal, Assistant Curator, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. A catalogue will be published by the Power Plant Gallery (tentative release: May 2020).

Public Programs: 

Lecture: Nancy Campbell on Shuvinai Ashoona

February 22 | 11 AM

Room 4East, In the Gallery

Free for Gallery Members or with admission. Registration is required.

Register today at vanartgallery.bc.ca/events.

Described Tour

March 28 | 10:45 AM

2nd Floor, In the Gallery

This program is designed for people of all ages who are blind and partially sighted. Capacity is limited. Registration is required.

To register, please contact the Group Bookings Coordinator at 604.662.4717 or at groupbookings@vanartgallery.bc.ca to register.