about annie poogook's sobey award winning drawings


i was impressed formally, with Poogooks work--i mean she is a third generation cape dorset worker, and so one cannot get over that heritage, but she doesnt try to.

The work, for many reasons, is intended to be about the north, she is deconstructing the souths realtionship to the north, to the idea of a kind of blank wilderness. It is not only that she draws tvs and porn and jerry springer and the like, it is something else.

The colours for one. The pastels, greys, bright greens, pinks, etc are so much against the idea of whiteness, but not in a fake Ted Harrison way; and the way that the figures work in clusters, in twos or three--reminding one of the collective north, but also the history of forced settlement. I am reminded of the large drawing she did of the frozen food section, up north, and the women buying groceries, and it reminds me of how political in Canada, the weather can be; and what it means to civilize the cold--how much of a fuck you that is to Atwood's Surrival or Valgardsen or Sinclair Ross...

There is a backlash against her, because people think she is cute, and i think aside from the documentary work above, and how important making the fantasia of otherness that infuses cape dorset real, is incredibly important, but i think also she is deeply honest. Her drawings of drug addiction and achocholism, and her combonotion of native and christian religious texts has a desperation and mournful rawness that doesnt seem like she is being cute, having those two sets of work together at the powerplant, talked more about what it meant to be inuit, then any of the white papers and isaac gallery shows and earnest reports in the globe and mail ever could.

i realise there will always be problems, telling tales out of school, exoticism, the politics of otherness, gender, race, desire--and the outsider/insider processing is a really sensitive spot right now, esp. with the explotation of the market, and the difficulty of funnelling all of that insular work as it explodes into the world stage will be a really difficult game to play, and im not sure shes playing it well--but those are slightly seperate questions than the work itself.

all of that said, i couldnt imagine a better artist winning the sobey--the problems of the market withstanding...