Annie Pootoogook

Cape Dorset in Nunavu has long been the Centre of Inuit art activity with the founding of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in the 1950s. Renowned artists such as Pudlo Pudlat, Kenojuak Ashevak and Napachie Pootoogook have mapped a history for artistic production in the region through the Co-op and the Cape Dorset Print Collections. These elder artists grew up on the land and their work typically records and reflects the traditional Inuit lifestyle. This style is synonymous with what the South perceives Inuit art looks like.

Born in Cape Dorset in 1969, Annie Pootoogook is the daughter of artist Napachie and Eegyvudlu Pootoogook and granddaughter of renowned artist Pitseolak Ashoona. Annie Pootoogook began drawing in 1997 under the encouragement and support of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative. The Co-op remains the distributor for the artists in the community, buying their work, providing them with studio space and materials, and promoting their art in the South. In many ways the idealistic notion of the artist and the creative spirit is highly mediated through economics. Art making is the main industry in the community and discussion of artistic practice often takes place in these terms.

Unlike many of her peers, Pootoogook’s work challenges conventional assumptions made of “Inuit” art. Like her grandmother, Annie is a chronicler, and her drawings of domestic interiors and modern outpost camps reflect the disparate social, economic and physical realities of today’s Canadian North. Many of Pootoogook’s images are disturbing; addressing issues such as alcoholism, domestic violence, suicide depression and drug addiction.

At 36 years old, she is the first of a generation of Inuit raised in two different worlds. The work sites the necessity like much recent art, of Place, of the flux of the global and the local. Pootoogook's work is idiosyncratic and highly personal and because of this has found a new language to communicate the Inuit experience, which has changed dramatically in the past thirty years.

Annie Pootoogook was born in Cape Dorset in 1969, Annie Pootoogook is the daughter of artist Napachie and Eegyvudlu Pootoogook and granddaughter of renowned artist Pitseolak Ashoona. Annie Pootoogook began drawing in 1997 under the encouragement and support of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative.

Curated by Nancy Campbell