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Art Review: Inuit postcards at New York NMAI
Friday, July 24, 2009
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment

"The 2007 edition of Documenta, the contemporary-art exposition held once every five years in Kassel, Germany, was an ultraglobal affair. Names of artists from far-flung places filled the roster. And it’s a safe bet that few of those names were as unfamiliar to the mainstream art world as that of Annie Pootoogook.

Ms. Pootoogook lives and works in the Inuit hamlet of Cape Dorset, just below the Arctic Circle in far northern Canada. Everyday life in that remote settlement, where she was born in 1969, was the subject of the ink-and-crayon drawings that she showed at Kassel. And strange drawings they seemed, with their shifts between homeyness and violence.

In one, an Inuit family is seen in a cluttered living room watching Jerry Springer on television. In another, a woman is assaulted in her bedroom. A polar bear noses around outside a house. A man covers his face with his hands and weeps.

It was hard to know what to make of these condensed and unexplained narratives, of art that was neither conventionally heavy nor light. People tended to look, hesitate, look again, then quickly move on to the next gallery.

Several of those Documenta pictures are in Ms. Pootoogook’s solo exhibition at the George Gustav Heye Center, the Lower Manhattan branch of the National Museum of the American Indian, where they feel less exotic and unanswering, largely because of the changed context. At Documenta the work was presented simply as contemporary art even if it didn’t fit any ready internationalist models. At the Heye Center it is inescapably Native American, automatically inviting an ethnic reading."

Get the Story:
Postcards From Canada’s ‘New North’ (The New York Times 7/24)