Niap in Neon

Niap, an Inuit artist from Northern Quebec, symbolically reclaims her ancestral territory by painting over landscape photographs.

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Niap, an Inuit artist from Northern Quebec, readies herself for a performance. Barefoot and clad in black leggings and a black shirt, she focuses on a large black-and-white photograph on the wall of the Marion Scott Gallery, where her first solo show in Vancouver, Reclamation and De-Categorization, is on view until Dec. 21.

Some 20 people have gathered to watch Niap’s 15-minute performance. The sound of recorded wind fills the gallery, then stark piano music and throat singing, and, eventually, women talking, snow crunching underfoot, and poetry in Inuktitut, the traditional language in Nunavik, the homeland of the Quebec Inuit, where Niap was born and raised.

She runs one hand along the austere photograph of a northern landscape, then steps back to squeeze neon paint onto paper plates. Dipping her brush into water and then the magenta paint, she sweeps opaque colour along the curve of a snow-covered mountain and runs her hands through the brushstroke.

Next, she dabs her fingers in bright orange and adds that colour. Eventuallly, she uses dripping hands to splatter colour directly onto the photo. When she is done, she turns to the audience, weeping.

“It’s the third performance I’ve done,” she says. “Every time, there’s a different energy. Today, I felt emotional, with a heavy heart. I felt the emotion of an outsider, so I was connecting with that. That’s why I was touching the photograph.”

Her show is a collaboration with Quebec photographer Robert Fréchette, whom Niap met at the Avataq Cultural Institute in Nunavik, an organization that helps to preserve and promote the Inuktitut language and Inuit culture through art and language programs, as well an archive and library.

Fréchette, a southerner with years of experience travelling in Nunavik, which spans the northern third of Quebec, was the institute’s president. Niap saw his photos and suggested working together. 

By painting over Fréchette’s photographs, Niap says she is symbolically reclaiming the land for her people. She describes the collaboration as an act of reconciliation. “To lend me his photos, and allow me to paint them however I want, takes a lot of generosity.” 

Niap, who splits her time between Montreal and her home community of Kuujjuaq, was known as Nancy Saunders before she choose a customary single name. She uses her practice to investigate her cultural heritage – her mother is Inuk and her father of European descent.

Now in her 30s, she is a multidisciplinary artist and throat singer with work in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Avataq institute. Last year, she received a $2,500 scholarship through the Inuit Art Foundation to support her post-secondary studies in Inuit arts and culture. 

Why does she use such bright colours? 

“I’m an urban woman and I choose funky colours just because I can,” she says. “I chose these funky, street colours to contrast with the black and white. I look for various things I can use to mark-make. I have lots of ideas. They come to me in dreams. I have also stitched on paper and I have other ideas for thread.” 

The work she completed in the performance is the 14th in her show, which includes two other large-scale pieces and 11 smaller images, all collaborative works with Fréchette. They will remain unique, she says. “I won’t do another performance like this one.”   ■

Niap: Reclamation and De-Categorization is on view at the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver from Nov. 2 to Dec. 21, 2019.

Correction 1/6/2020: An earlier version of this article misstated that Niap's scholarship was awarded by the Avataq Cultural Institution in Nunavik. It was actually awarded by the Inuit Art Foundation. This story has been updated.

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