Inuit art evolving to include contemporary themes, printmaker says

“How We Dress,” a new work by Shuvinai Ashoona, was printed by hand at Studio PM in partnership with the West Baffin Co-Op. Prints cost $750 with $600 going to the Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Fund which supports arts scholarships for young aspiring Inuit. (PHOTO COURTESY OF STUDIO PM)

Nunavut is a complex place defined by more than just clichés like polar bears and sealskins. The same goes for Inuit art.

Master printmaker Paul Machnik says it’s time for printmaking in Nunavut to evolve beyond the iconic and traditional Kenojuak Ashevak-style we so often see represented in galleries worldwide.

“You can’t just keep on repeating the same old, same old. Not to put it down, but you need to move on,” Machnik said at the Canadian Guild of Crafts in Montreal after his lecture there on printmaking, Feb. 28.

That means going from pretty animals on the tundra to depicting current issues Inuit face today.

And if anyone has the credibility to call for a new era in Inuit printmaking, it’s Machnik.

He’s hosted printmaking workshops in Cape Dorset and around Nunavut since the mid-1990s and owns his own art studio in Montreal called Studio PM.

In fact, he was a fan of Ashevak decades before he started on his life’s goal of helping revive the art of printmaking in the Eastern Arctic.

“When he was a boy he saw a little stamp of Kenojuak [Ashevak],” said Machnik’s partner Bess Muhlstock.

“It was the Enchanted Owl. And he kept that stamp in a little box. And he always thought he would want to work with the Inuit,” Muhlstock said.

Turns out that little boy was right.

Machnik now helps fill the annual Cape Dorset print collection with about 10 to15 prints per year which he gathers during northern trips sponsored, in part, by the West Baffin Co-operative and Cape Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto.

On Feb. 28, Machnik told a crowd of 35 Montrealers about his most recent workshop in Cape Dorset, one that lasted two-and-a-half weeks.

“When I go up, I’m like a bit of a rabbit running around with my head cut off — to the homes of the artists, to the atelier,” he told the crowd during the lecture.

Machnik helped more than a dozen artists etch metal plates for their prints. What follows is a long process of proofing, assessing and colouring before the prints make it into the annual collection.

It’s clear from his presentation that Machnik passionately supports Inuit artists who depict modern day subject matter, not just those traditional symbols.

“If we don’t allow the Inuit to speak about what is really going on, we are keeping them in that framework of the good old days. Which isn’t really true,” Machnik said.

Machnik points to works from Shuvinai Ashoona as an example of a new era in Inuit art.

One of Ashoona’s most recent works, called “How We Dress,” shows two women — one in an amauti and another in an Islamic burka.

Another shows a man behind bars in a courtroom, staring toward a judge and a Canadian flag, with his family in the background.

But collectors love the look of traditional Inuit art. Those in the business know that’s what draws crowds to galleries which display the annual Cape Dorset print collection.

And that means fewer opportunities to showcase experimental, contemporary subject matter and limited incentives for the artists themselves.

Producing prints also costs much more than it did 50 or 60 years ago, which doesn’t help younger, often financially strapped artists, Machnik said.

Galleries should start selecting and supporting more contemporary Inuit art which is now starting to trickle out of Nunavut, and new, younger artists as well, he added.

“There are galleries that would be interested. So why are we limited to these select group of galleries?”

One solution is for galleries to promote artists to an international audience, Machnik said. Trade shows and cultural centres are ideal venues for showcasing contemporary prints as well.

Diana Perera, an Inuit art specialist with the Canadian Guild of Crafts, said she’d love to see more contemporary themes in northern artworks.

“Sometimes it is put into an ethnic box,” Perera said.

Galleries have a responsibility to nurture this new era in Inuit art, she said, “to let people know the changes, the advances, how things have changed, the new work coming out of the North.”

Peter Machnik speaks to a crowd of 35 people Feb. 28 about his recent printmaking workshop in Cape Dorset which occurred earlier in February. (PHOTO BY DAVID MURPHY)