Pioneering Cape Dorset artworks enter the 21st century

Curator Elyse Portal, left and arts student Maxine Veneracion, lay out a drawing — believed to have been done by the late Cape Dorset artist Joe Jaw — to be photographed and digitized. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

A mother and her son try out one of three video games set up as part of the Journey Into Fantasy exhibit at the McMichael gallery July 8. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

Art archivists and researchers, from left, Richard Laurin, Maxine Veneracion and Elyse Portal stand down one aisle in an expansive vault in the basement of the McMichael art gallery just north of Toronto. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

TORONTO — A piece of Cape Dorset’s cultural history lies in one of the most unlikely places.

The basement of Ontario’s McMichael Canadian Art Collection, just north of Toronto, holds a record of history that spans more than three decades.

Its expansive vault houses more than 100,000 drawings and prints, on long-term loan from the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset.

The thousands of drawings are stacked in long boxes, separated by sheets of Mylar, and marked with the names of the co-op’s artists, many of them now departed — Lucy Qinnauyuak, Peter Pitseolak, Eleeshushe Parr and her famed artist husband, Parr, to name only a handful of the more than 100 artists represented there.

The collection is a snapshot of life around the Baffin community from the mid-1950s, when local artists first started producing work with the co-op, up until the late 1980s — a period that saw tremendous change for Inuit.

The drawings, etched in graphite, coloured pencils and felt ink, depict Arctic animals of every kind — wild and while being hunted — as well as the craggy Baffin landscape and early interactions between Inuit and Qallunaat and the new tools they introduced, such as boats and airplanes.

“It’s really a hidden history,” said Elyse Portal, curator and research assistant for the York University-based Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage project or MICH.

“It’s a history that was produced for the public, but most people haven’t seen these. Often times, [artists] were asked to portray things they’d seen in their lives.”

The drawings arrived in Toronto on a chartered plane in March 1991, following an agreement between the McMichael and Terry Ryan, then the co-op’s general manager.

While fires had destroyed co-ops in both Sanikiluaq and Baker Lake in recent years — and their Inuit art collections along with them — Ryan wanted to find a place to safeguard Cape Dorset’s collection until a better venue could be built.

Almost 25 years later, that still hasn’t happened.

But as part of an initiative between the gallery and York University, it’s hoped each piece can be digitized and preserved as part of a database that will one day return to Nunavut, where the images were born.

The painstaking process of digitizing each image begins in another room in McMichael’s basement. That’s where a camera, set up on what looks like a miniature crane system, captures each image and sends it to a computer program for colour touch-ups before they are transformed into digital files.

Each piece is photographed four or five times, to ensure the whole piece is captured, along with any syllabics or text written on the page.

On a Wednesday afternoon, York University arts student Maxine Veneracion is working on digitizing pieces from what the group of archivists call a “problem box” — one containing pieces whose creators remain unknown or uncertain.

This particular drawing is covered in large colourful birds, filled in with felt tip pen. They speculate the drawing could have been penned by Joe Jaw, a well-known carver.

But as part of the digitization process, archivists will confer with elders and art experts to try to identify untitled pieces.

More than 4,000 pieces have already been digitized, including many of the works by Cape Dorset’s Pudloo Pudlat.

Some of those drawings now form the basis of the first-ever interactive Inuit art exhibition now on at the McMichael, called “Ingirrajut Isumaginnguaqtaminnut: Journey Into Fantasy.”

With the help of Nunavut game developer Pinnguaq, visitors to the exhibit can play three different video games, narrated in Inuktitut and using graphics animated from Pudlat’s prints.

In the often solemn space of a gallery setting, the exhibit’s iPads are an immediate draw for youngsters who pull on headphones and likely listen to their very first words of Inuktitut.

That’s just one example of what kinds of audiences the Cape Dorset collection can reach, once in digital form.

But for the archivists sifting through the thousands of drawings in the McMichael vault, the Cape Dorset collection offers unique access to the venerable pioneers of modern-day Inuit art.

Richard Laurin, the collection’s archive assistant, says he’s constantly impressed by what he sees.

“A lot of these pieces are pulled out of sketch books, but only a handful I’ve seen have eraser marks,” he said. “They never seemed to try and negate it or make it disappear.

“That confidence in their work is really impressive.”

A giant stone sculpture of a polar bear carved by Pauta Saila greets visitors to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection gallery outside of Toronto. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)