Shuvinai Ashoona Drawings
Sandra Dyck
Carleton University Art Gallery
96 pp 30 col. ill. 10 x 8 in softcover
978–0–7709 –0548–4
$25.00 Can. $28.00 U.S. (20 €)
February 2012Shuvinai Ashoona (b. 1961, Cape Dorset, Baffin Island) is the daughter of the well-known sculptor Kiugak Ashoona and granddaughter of the late Pitseolak Ashoona, the great graphic artist. Her own career started in the mid-1990s when she began making drawings for the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. In 2010 her work was featured in the National Gallery of Canada’s biennial exhibition It Is What It Is.
Shuvinai Ashoona’s distinctive drawings have garnered her increasing attention since her emergence in the mid-1990s. This first monograph surveys the extraordinary range of her styles, subjects, and approaches from her early monochromatic landscapes, to her vividly-coloured interpretations of everyday life in Cape Dorset, to her fantastical scenes that partake of the whimsical and the grotesque. Ashoona’s work is marked by an apparently effortless movement between the past and present, actual and imagined, and interior and external worlds. She evinces the same delight in obsessive and subtle mark making with black ink as she does in comparatively minimal line drawing with pencil crayon. Her drawings compel our attention in part because they are born of a singular and poignant vision that was forged in, but transcends, a specific place – Cape Dorset.
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