Introduction
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The Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent drawings by Cape Dorset’s Itee Pootoogook. On view from March 12 to April 10, Itee Pootoogook includes 40 meticulously rendered images, mostly dating from 2006 through to the present. Included are landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of friends and acquaintances. The exhibition, Pootoogook’s first with MSG, inaugurates the gallery’s new space on Granville Street, located in the heart of Vancouver’s vibrant gallery district.
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A resident of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Pootoogook belongs to a new generation of Inuit artists who are transforming and reshaping the creative traditions that were successfully pioneered by their parents and grandparents during the second half of the 20th century. In his graphite and coloured pencil drawings, Pootoogook presents us with an image of modern northern life quite different from the one we are accustomed to seeing in much Inuit art. Instead of traditional subjects such as igloos and parka-clad hunters and their prey, we are shown an everyday contemporary Inuit world, one made up of snowmobiles, wooden boats, soft drinks and modern interiors complete with television sets.
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The exhibition features a number of images representing northern architecture, a theme that is especially important to Pootoogook. In some cases, modern houses are shown in barren northern landscapes, serving as poetic testaments to human resilience in this vast and inhospitable region. In other works, Pootoogook focuses on the rectangular forms of windows and exterior walls, revelling in their formal clarity and abstract elegance. In a different part of his oeuvre, Pootoogook’s portraits show members of his community doing their work (whether stone carving or construction) or relaxing at home (in front of a TV or on a sofa).
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Pootoogook’s way of making images is equally inventive. The heightened realism in his works, combined with his attention to the more mundane features of everyday northern life, gives evidence of a strikingly contemporary artistic sensibility. Pootoogook’s frequent use of photographs as source material for his images is a further indication of his contemporaneity, contributing to the sense of psychological calm, minimal incident and stillness that pervades many of the images.
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Itee Pootoogook was born in 1951 in Kimmirut (formerly Lake Harbour) on southern Baffin Island, moving to Cape Dorset when he was still a child. The son of artists Ishuhungitok and Paulassie Pootoogook, Itee made his first drawings in the mid-1980s, receiving encouragement from the managers of the community’s renowned printmaking studio. This early period of exploration with the drawing medium was interrupted following a temporary move back to Kimmirut in the late 1980s. Pootoogook resumed his interest in drawing when he returned to Dorset in the late 1990s. In 2008 one of his images was included in the community’s spring print collection. His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.

Press Release
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Selected Press
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VANCOUVER SUN

Exhibition Monograph

Related Pages
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ITEE POOTOOGOOK

Further Reading
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“Itee Pootoogook: A Comfort Level in the Medium,” Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 2010
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Robert Enright, “Drawing in the Cold,” Border Crossings, issue no. 115

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