If you live in the Arctic cold, you had better cherish your way of life. For an artist, but not only for an artist, that includes the traditions that shape one’s craft.
Still, you might welcome a little company now and then beyond “the people”—in the native language, the Inuit. It might even open the imagination to a certain challenge. Shuvinai Ashoona finds that challenge, too, in an unlikely place. She draws Polar Bear Sketching People, at Fort Gansevoort through November 4.
At over eight feet long, a work by that name also has ample room for a rabbit making art and a still more fantastic being, plus a more ordinary circle of women friends in a reassuringly domestic interior. Another row of women is slightly less artistic but just as proud, as Holding What They Made in Town. And what they made is clothing, which it may require leaving home now and then to communal facilities with shared tools and access to markets. Made My Clothing at Clothing Center says so, although there two women are joined by that might be their pets carrying on their craft as well. Closer to home, a husband and wife can still appear carving soapstone together. Either way, they proclaim, Keep the Circle Stronger.
Way too glib and reassuring? Much of today’s celebration of diversity in art can seem that way, but reassurance may not come quite as easily as first appears. An Inuk, or Inuit person, Ashoona lives on Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut and the Northwest Passage, between Greenland to the north and the Hudson Bay. Yet the warmth of a parka appears just twice, unless you count the fur of a polar bear, and what the women made in town are t-shirts. I am shivering already. New York winters are bad enough.
Ashoona is nurturing fantasy while attesting to a way of life. One scene takes place under the sea. She is also broadening her vista to take into account the breadth in her mind of that way of life. In another work, she is Drawing Like an Elephant, a creature that does not often keep company with Eskimo and Inuit, even if it could draw. Her technique, too, looks to traditional Asian art and its calligraphic impulse. Her primary media are colored pencil and ink on paper.
This gallery has a fondness for the influence of folk art, in cultures far from New York and most often to the South, as with Dawn Williams Boyd, Myrlande Constant, and Willie Birch. This is Ashoona’s first exhibition here. Still, this is work on paper on an ambitious scale, although not uniformly so. It is also sophisticated enough to accommodate her chosen media’s gentle colors and dappled light, with dense spots of gouache akin almost to Pointillism. Colored pencil lends a wavering texture. Ink enters to thicken outlines and to flatten form.
She also nurtures paradox, between work on paper and mural scale—or between fantasy and that way of life. It allows rocks and sea to take on a shaping role, close to abstraction, while the figures remain less than grounded. One image, again at eight feet long, shows people in boots, Moving Our Campsite. Another, at eight feet high, assigns separate groups of people to sky and sea. You can always blame climate change for the absence of ice. Then, too, you need not see the ice to relish the warmth or to know that the ice is there.
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