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Ashoona, Shuvinai
Selling Drawings, Sculpture and Guitar
2017

A graphic artist who is known for her deeply personal symbolism and unconventional, dream-like landscapes taken from around her home community of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Shuvinai Ashoona (b. 1961), also has a documentary impulse and astute visual wit. The three figures in this drawing (left to right), the late Alariaq Pudlat, her cousin Goo Pootoogook, and late father Kiugak Ashoona, all hold drawings made by Shuvinai, as well as from others in the community. These “drawings within drawings,” another common stylistic device of the artist, are part of her reflexive strategy to make visible the constructs of documentary art, and externalize the economic and social forces that striate the commercial markets for Inuit art. The guitar in the drawing refers to a series of works the artist undertook between 2008 and 2014 when, after working closely with her gallery, she began to paint her signature designs upon guitars and ukuleles in an effort to explore new modes of graphic production.

 
Ashoona, Shuvinai
Cape Dorset (Kinngait) NU 1961
Selling Drawings, Sculpture and Guitar
2017
Coloured pencils and ink on paper
58.7 x 76.2 cm
Purchase, Chancellor Richardson Memorial Fund, 2019
62-009.02

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