Introduction

The Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to announce Patterns from Nature, an exhibition of recent drawings by Cape Dorset’s Ningeokuluk Teevee. Born in 1963 in Cape Dorset and largely self-taught as an artist, Teevee began making drawings for the community’s cooperative in the late 1990s. Since 2004, several of Teevee’s drawings have been translated into limited edition prints and included as part of Cape Dorset’s annual print collections. One of Dorset’s most accomplished and inventive artists, her work addresses a range of traditional and contemporary concerns. Dating from 2004 through 2006, the eleven drawings in ink on paper showcased here, in Teevee’s first solo show with the Marion Scott Gallery, explore the fascinating relationship between abstraction and representation. Our show highlights also Teevee’s ongoing interest in the patterns found specifically in nature.

Among the works here that can be categorized as landscapes, one drawing shows a jumble of white broken ice expanding out towards a distant horizon even as it crowds in towards a single small islet of reddish-brown land. The overlapping silhouettes in the receding icescape produce an irregular but recognizable pattern. In similar fashion, a second image portrays a treeless hilly landscape as a series of overlapping semi-circular shapes. Each of the rounded hilltops is covered in a stylized pattern of abstract motifs, and northern hares run incidentally through the scene to escape a wandering predatory fox.

Not all of the works in the exhibition employ exclusively northern motifs. Some of the most stylized images are derived from tree forms found also in the South, as in a pair of drawings that feature branches spreading, tentacle-like, from a centre, a multitude of loose leaves filling the spaces between. In Untitled (tree full of ptarmigan), Teevee similarly presents us with an image of a standing tree with a spreading network of roots. A flock of ptarmigans is visible on the lower branches, while additional birds emerge on close inspection in the tree’s leafier upper section, their shapes blending with the shapes of the leaves themselves.

Despite the non-narrative orientation of her work, Teevee has stated that she has been most influenced by the work of the late Cape Dorset graphic artist and storyteller Napachie Pootoogook: “She also tells stories, and I like the way she draws people moving or how their hair is flowing. I like to think that my own work expresses movement as well.” No work better exhibits Teevee’s interest in the portrayal of motion than Untitled (swirling leaves), one of the show’s most strikingly abstract images. Here, dense masses of simple leaf forms alternately swirl in whirlpool-like circles or flow across the page, issuing in an exhilarating image of pure rhythm.

Further Reading

“Ningeokuluk Teevee: A Very Fine Graphic Sensibility,” Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 24, no. 4, Winter 2009

Gallery Information

MARION SCOTT GALLERY
2423 GRANVILLE STREET
VANCOUVER, BC CANADA V6H 3G5
TEL: 604.685.1934
FAX: 604.685.1890
ART@MARIONSCOTTGALLERY.COM