Juanisialu Irqumia, Fox and Seagulls Eating a White Whale/Beached White Whale is Rotted and the Foxes and Crows are Eating It, 1965, stonecut on paper, 29/30. Gift of Margaret McGowan, Arts ’78, 2017 (60-003.13)

Printmaking flourished in many Inuit communities in the early 1960s, buoyed by a changing art world, Canadian nationalism, and reshaped attitudes towards Indigenous culture. Puvirnituq [Povungnetuk], in Nunavik [Arctic Quebec], was among the first communities to develop a print studio, when the artist Gordon Yearsley was hired by the co-operative to administer a print program. Yearsley focused upon the stone-cut relief and stencil technique. Artists such as Noah Quinuayark, Thomassiapik Sivuarapik, Leah Qumaluk, and others, created their first experimental prints in 1961. That same year, printmakers from Cape Dorset, which was the first Inuit community to begin printmaking, traveled to Puvirnituq to share their knowledge. Yearsley left due to differences with Father Andre Steinmann, the influential Catholic missionary. Vctor Tinkl was hired in 1962 to continue the print program. The Puvirnituq studio adopted the modern sosaku-hanga “self-printing” method, whereby the graphic artist cut his/her own block and printed the images, in contrast to the division of print labour that had emerged in Cape Dorset.

The Puvirnituq studio submitted its first prints to the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council advisory board in 1962. The community released its first annual collection in that year as a co-release with Cape Dorset (subsequent releases would be independent). The Puvirnituq co-operative built a studio facility in the community, and printmaking expanded, with exhibitions across Canada, the US and internationally. Puvirnituq prints are known for their direct, “unpolished” look, the frequent inclusion of text, and hunting, myth, and historical scenes. Printmaking began to decline in Puvirnituq in the 1980s. A fire gutted the studio, which effectively ended printmaking in Puvirnituq in 1989.

Stephen Andrews, Quick, 1992, encaustic, pigment and ink on canvas. Gift of Herbert O. Bunt, 1996 (39-052)

In the early 1990s, Stephen Andrews was working with re-reproduced and faxed images, a strategy of technical degradation he used to evoke forgetting, loss of resolve, the tenuous character of relation-ships and even, at a time when so many gay men were lost to AIDS, of life itself.

Quick is part of a series of images of kisses gleaned from porn magazines, life-affirming assertions of gay sensuality. The use of pigment and beeswax deepens the organic physicality of the painting. Andrews described his intentions in hand-copying digital images thus: “Previously I had worked figuratively, using line and shadow to evoke the emotional content of the image… What I’m trying to do now is effect the same emotional impact but with an even more pared-down line… hardly even a line, a pixel mark. With the pixel-mark the emotional content remains unadorned, and as such does not manipulate the viewer’s response.”