A third-generation Inuit artist based in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada, Shuvinai Ashoona is best known for her highly personal and imaginative iconographic art. In this catalogue spanning a twenty-year career, Ashoona’s imagery begins with closely observed naturalistic scenes of her Arctic home of Kinngait (formerly known as Cape Dorset), continuing a tradition begun by Ashoona’s grandmother and cousin, also artists. Later, shifting to more monstrous and fantastical visions, her drawings imagine the past and present fused into a prophetic future: human-animal hybrid creatures, women birthing worlds, and mystical or otherworldly landscapes inspired by the Arctic terrain. Existing somewhere between dystopian and utopian, Ashoona’s brightly coloured pencil crayon and ink drawings teem with life.
This expansive catalogue accompanies The Power Plant’s major 2019 exhibition Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds and provides insight into Ashoona’s practice, including select exhibition history, large-format illustrations and installation images, and several texts from Canadian and international authors, including: a foreword by The Power Plant’s Director, Gaëtane Verna; a message from West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative President, Pauloosie Kowmageak; an introduction by exhibition curator Nancy Campbell; essays by Tarralik Duffy, Meeka Walsh, Michelle Gay, Robert Kardosh, and Justine Kohleal; and eleven commentaries on specific works by Shary Boyle, Laura Demers, Jacques Des Rochers, Tarah Hogue, Christine Lalonde, Frances Loeffler, Roger Malbert, Gerald McMaster, Sarah Milroy, Wanda Nanibush, and Jocelyn Piirainen.
This expansive catalogue accompanies The Power Plant’s major 2019 exhibition Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds and provides insight into Ashoona’s practice, including select exhibition history, large-format illustrations and installation images, and several texts from Canadian and international authors, including: a foreword by The Power Plant’s Director, Gaëtane Verna; a message from West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative President, Pauloosie Kowmageak; an introduction by exhibition curator Nancy Campbell; essays by Tarralik Duffy, Meeka Walsh, Michelle Gay, Robert Kardosh, and Justine Kohleal; and eleven commentaries on specific works by Shary Boyle, Laura Demers, Jacques Des Rochers, Tarah Hogue, Christine Lalonde, Frances Loeffler, Roger Malbert, Gerald McMaster, Sarah Milroy, Wanda Nanibush, and Jocelyn Piirainen.