Introduction
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The Marion Scott Gallery and Kardosh Projects are pleased to announce an exhibition of works celebrating the life and legacy of Kananginak Pootoogook (1935-2010). On view from December 10 to January 28, the exhibition will comprise 27 drawings made by Pootoogook across the last five years, including some of his last works produced in the months before his death in November 2010. An opening reception and public tribute will be held in the gallery on Saturday, December 10, from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
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In an artistic career that lasted more than five decades, Pootoogook produced a body of work of lasting cultural and aesthetic significance. Born in 1935 in a small hunting camp on southern Baffin Island near Cape Dorset, he was raised to be a hunter and trapper like his father. But in 1957, he began collaborating with James Houston, an artist from southern Canada hired by the federal government to establish the North’s first printmaking studio. Working first as a printmaker responsible for translating drawings by the community’s older artists into limited edition stonecut prints, Pootoogook soon developed his own drawing style. Alongside the print shop’s national and international success, Pootoogook’s own artistic career blossomed. He became known especially for his careful studies of birds and other northern wildlife. Later, he began making a visual record of Inuit culture in transition, documenting many of the changes he had witnessed throughout his lifetime. Pootoogook continued to draw until the spring of 2010, when illness forced him to seek treatment in an Ottawa hospital.
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The exhibition will feature a number of Pootoogook’s distinctive wildlife portraits, including several of caribou, a subject for which he was especially known. In these iconic images, Pootoogook represents the animal’s seasonal habits, using unconventional perspectives to show these majestic creatures from a variety of startling angles. Other drawings portray birds that frequent the arctic, including families of snowy owls and colonies of murres (sea birds that resemble penguins). In a few works, Pootoogook has used bird forms as a starting point for more purely abstract compositions.
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The exhibition is notable also for several images that document social and cultural change in the North. In a fascinating series of drawings from 2006, the artist has appropriated modern ethnographic representations to create his own catalogue of traditional and modern tools, as these index various phases and transformations of Inuit culture. Other images portray the use of modern technology such as skidoos and augers or ice drills.
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In a suite of autobiographical drawings from 2010, among the last works the artist produced, Pootoogook depicts himself, either alone or in the company of Shooyoo, his wife. In one especially brilliant image, he presents himself circa 1965 as a young man wearing a suit and sunglasses—a look back at his early days as a global ambassador for the new expressions coming out of the North.
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Partial proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to a social services organization in Cape Dorset.

Press Release
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Selected Press
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CANADIAN ART
VANCOUVER SUN

Related Pages
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KANANGINAK POOTOOGOOK

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