Distinguished Inuit artist’s drawings on public display for the first time

Vancouver, BC—Mark Emerak had already lived a full life when, at the age of 66, he gave up hunting and trapping for a new career as a graphic artist. Over the next decade and a half, the Holman resident produced more than 900 drawings, becoming one of that community’s most prominent artists. At the time of his death in 1983 at the age of 82, Emerak was widely seen as an elder statesman of northern Canadian art.

While over 40 of Emerak’s images were translated into limited edition stonecuts and lithographs by Holman’s printmakers and sold through galleries across North America, viewers in the South have had little or no opportunity to see the original drawn works of this important Canadian artist. That will finally change this fall when Vancouver’s Marion Scott Gallery presents Emerak: Drawings, a small yet representative selection of 25 of the artist’s sensitive works on paper dating from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.

“This exhibition brings us closer to one of the North’s major artists,” says Director Judy Scott Kardosh. “Emerak’s gentle spirit comes through much more clearly in his drawings than in the prints, as compositionally beautiful as the latter typically are. Line drawing was Emerak’s medium, and this intimate retrospective fully captures his artistic soul for the very first time.”

Emerak was born in 1901 on Victoria Island in the high western Arctic. He spent his first years in the Cambridge Bay area before migrating with his family north to Minto Inlet, where hunting was believed to be better. After losing his first wife to another man in a traditional contest of strength, Emerak married Udyok, with whom he had several children. In the early 1950s, he moved to the new settlement of Holman in order that his children could receive formal schooling. In 1966, Emerak made his first drawings for the Holman Eskimo Co-operative, emerging thereafter as one of the community’s strongest and most distinctive artistic voices.

Emerak’s graphite and ink drawings, like his prints, portray the traditional activities and lifestyle of the Copper Inuit (named for the copper that is found on Victoria Island). But according to exhibition curator Robert Kardosh, Emerak’s drawings offer more than a valuable ethnographic record of a unique lifestyle by someone who experienced it first hand. “Emerak’s works on paper bring us into contact with a pre-literate and fundamentally non-Western style of visualization,” Kardosh states. “The drawings are created without regard to Western conventions like perspective and landscape, and although they may seem simple at first, they are in fact highly conceptual and full of invention.”

According to Kardosh, the exhibition will be the public’s first opportunity to view a body of Emerak’s drawings together in one place. “Because the Holman Co-op never sought to market the drawings in its care, these works have remained in storage all these years as archival material in the community. In fact, very few of Emerak’s drawings ever left Holman, and in the past only people who traveled there have been able to see these remarkable images.”

Emerak: Drawings opens Saturday, October 15 at the Marion Scott Gallery, 308 Water Street, and runs through November 13, 2005. The exhibition is part of a yearlong series of special shows marking the Marion Scott Gallery's 30th anniversary as a dealer of fine Inuit art from the Canadian North.

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For more information, please call Robert Kardosh at 604-685-1934