Introduction
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The Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent work by Cape Dorset’s Jamasie Pitseolak. On view from May 12 to June 12, Jamasie Pitseolak: Sculptures, Drawings, Prints will feature more than 30 images produced across the last five years. The long awaited exhibition will be the first to focus entirely on the artist’s expression, and includes sculptures as well as works on paper. A public reception will be held on Thursday, May 12 from 6 to 8 pm, and a closing talk with the artist will be held on Saturday, June 11 at 2 pm.
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At 42, Jamasie Pitseolak is at the forefront of a generation of Inuit artists who are bringing new ideas and sensibilities to the evolving tradition of northern art. Born in 1968 in Cape Dorset on southern Baffin Island, Pitseolak belongs to the first generation of Inuit who grew up in permanent year-round settlements. The son of artists Mark and Ookpik Pitseolak, he began carving when he was 8 or 9, selling his first works to the Hudson’s Bay Company. One of his earliest influences was his grandfather, Peter Pitseolak, a well-known carver and photographer from the Dorset area. Feeling a lack of connection with more traditional themes and unsatisfied with the direction of his work, he began incorporating unconventional modern imagery into his expression in the late 1990s.
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Like many Inuit sculptors, Pitseolak works in a range of organic and non-organic indigenous materials, including stone, antler and ivory. The similarity ends there. Whereas most Inuit artists produce sculptures from single blocks of stone, Pitseolak works like a collagist, painstakingly assembling his images from individually carved pieces. Equally inventive is his distinctive modern subject matter. Instead of traditional images of hunters and wildlife, Pitseolak tends to represent distinctly modern objects—motorcycles, machinery with moveable parts, guitars and tables (complete with vases).
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The present exhibition also features a series of large format drawings. Completed during a fall 2010 residency at Montreal’s Studio PM, these works further reflect Pitseolak’s interest in representing single objects. One charcoal drawing portrays an electric guitar; another features a tree in a forest; a third depicts a jug with flowers. Another work in the same suite features a heavily worked image of John Lennon as a cultural icon. As with the sculptures, these two-dimensional images reflect the artist’s bold contemporary sensibility.
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The majority of Pitseolak’s works are marked by a playful charm, a quality reflected also in his sculptures’ titles, many of which are based on puns. That said, some works show a more serious approach. The exhibition includes several representations of guns and modern weaponry, and it is possible to read these as the artist’s engagement with local and global violence. Also included is a pair of drypoint etchings in which the artist invokes a painful episode from his past. These personal works, rendered in a raw expressionism, are both difficult and direct in their thematic and emotional address.
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Pitseolak’s work is in many private and public collections, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Jamasie Pitseolak: Sculptures, Drawings, Prints is his first solo exhibition.

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Selected Press
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CANADIAN ART

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JAMASIE PITSEOLAK

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