Exquisite Arts Magazine Vol 6- Summer Issue- July 2017 | Page 31

Exceptional simple style
Annie Pootoogook images enjoy expansive tracts of
white space with muted colour schemes that drab their
vibrancy. Her rudimentary realism illustrated in her
work refuses to be shackled by realism of space or
form. The interior scenes of her work inimitably line up
conspicuously with the image plane and portray a
simplistic interpretation that doesn’t rely on veracity to
nature. Time motif has been agreed as artistically
critical in the drawings of Pootoogook that defiantly
appears in her work as if to capture different moments
in the course of time.
Bloodline of Inuit art
Art runs deep in Annie Pootoogook’s blood and family
line; the daughter of Napachie Pootoogook, a robust
graphic artist in her own right who also left a unique
and special body of artwork over half a century
between 1938 and 2002. Napachie was the daughter of
Pitseolak Ashoona, who lived between 1904 and 1983,
perhaps the most identifiable of the three women by
both the older and younger generations. She displayed
unpretentious authenticity in her artistry and enjoyed a
staunch membership to the Royal Academy of the Arts.
Annie’s father was a stone sculptor and printmaker
while the Inuit draftswoman, Shuvinai Ashoona, an
effective modern day pen and pencil artist with keen
eye for contemporary Inuit life and Canadian
landscapes is her cousin.
Blatant art disclosures
While Dr. Phil is just another American TV show to
Annie it’s the title of her most notable piece of art
depicting a Kinngait, Nunavut young girl watching
the popular American show. Annie through her work
demonstrates the quiet satisfaction and pleasure of
showing personal demons, domestic abuse,
alcoholism, the lazy delight of staring at the
television watching cartoons, enjoying a cigarette
with a close person to sketches of fish stick dinner
and dead seal being cut up in country food.
Pootoogook did not spare anyone the jagged human
suffering disclosures of Inuit life in the present time,
veering off the Inuit art of the past that stuck to a
happy life in the North of joyous Inuit mothers in
amauti beads and dancing bears. Her work recorded
the straight up hybrid Inuit culture in declarative
frontage. From designing a bag for a Helsinki
contemporary Inuit artists’ exhibition with drawings
of curious lovers in erotic moments to a sketch of a
woman on her knees in prayer as a giant hand of the
divine reaches down in pious helping gesture, she
was drawing her life in every mark she made with
her pen and coloured pencils.
A profoundly courageous and influential Inuit artist
who has helped push the cultural boundaries of
modern Inuit and contemporary Canadian art, she
vanished around the Rideau River shore before her
body was found in the river on September 19, 2016.
Annie Pootoogook’s astounding body of work
expressing her capacity for tranquillity, playful
spirit, joy and resilience, courage, imagination and
absence of self-pity is a celebration that will be
explored for ages wherever Inuit and Canadian
contemporary art and pen masterstrokes come up.
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