Kenojuak Ashevak and Contemporaries
October 18, 2007 to May 10, 2008
Kenojuak, Ashevak and Contemporaries was an exhibition featuring three extraordinary drawings by Cape Dorset artist Kenojuak Ashevak (born 1927, Ikirasak Camp, Nunavut), on loan to the Art Centre from a private collection. Companion of the Order of Canada, recipient of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation’s award for lifetime achievement, member of the Royal Academy of Arts and recent inductee into Canada’s Walk of Fame, Ashevak is one of Canada’s most acclaimed graphic artists.
Born in an igloo in 1927, Ashevak is an artist who has lived in two very different worlds — one dominated by traditional Inuit culture, the other set squarely in twentieth-century western culture. In the late 1950s, Ashevak met James Houston, a federal administrator who encouraged the Inuit to make soapstone carvings, prints and drawings. During this period, Ashevak experimented with a great variety of materials and techniques.
Houston commissioned Ashevak to create sealskin appliqué designs and encouraged her to draw with pencil and paper. In the film, Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak (National Film Board 1962), Ashevak commented: “a piece of paper from the outside world is as thin as the shell of a snowbird’s egg."
In her first drawings, Ashevak portrayed subjects that were well known to her: people, faces, qarmaqs, igloos, Arctic dogs, sleds, fish, and birds. Ashevak’s drawings were among the first by an Inuk woman to be transferred to a template for printing. Over forty years, she has become known for specific subjects — predominantly birds, fish and human faces — created in fl owing webs of interconnected images and intricately-constructed patterns of texture and colour. As focused explorations of design, form and colour, Ashevak’s drawings in this exhibition are unusually large in scale and fine examples of her hallmark aesthetic.
Source: www.collectioncanada.ca/women/002026-502-e.html
Image:
Kenojuak Ashevak, Untitled, 2004 (coloured pencil on paper)
Anonymous Loan