The first retrospective of Itee Pootoogook (1951–2014), this exhibition gathers more than 60 drawings from the late artist’s body of work. As one of the key members of the third generation of Inuit artists from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Itee contributed to the transformation of the creative traditions inherited from his elders at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative’s Kinngait Studios. The son of artists Ishuhungitok and Paulassie Pootoogook, cousin of Annie Pootoogook and nephew of Kananginak Pootoogook, he began his artistic practice in the 1970s with an experiment in film animation, later adopting drawing as his medium of choice. By the late 1990s, he was actively involved in his newfound career as a graphic artist at Kinngait Studios.

Known as a meticulous draftsperson and an inventive landscapist, Itee looked primarily to contemporary Northern life for his subject matter. Although he produced his compositions from a combination of memory and imagination, Itee also based many of his drawings on photographs, an aspect of his artistic process that further highlights his contemporaneity. Featuring a minimum of incident, these understated images celebrate the mundane moments that make up the everyday but also the flashes of unrivalled natural beauty that are the delight of all who live in the North.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully bilingual (English and Inuktitut) publication, which includes texts by guest curator Nancy Campbell as well as responses to Pootoogook’s work from prominent contemporary artists and art historians.

Louie Palu’s documentary project provides a window into the evolving militarization of the North American Arctic, documenting the vestigial legacies of the Cold War and the increased military presence in the North today. The changes in the region are exacerbated by the many unknowns the Arctic faces, among them the warming of the planet and the increasing global traffic in the region. Over several years—from 2015 to 2018—what began for Palu as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship evolved into an assignment for National Geographic magazine, as he deepened his engagement with his subject. Taken as a whole, the series examines the growing geopolitical tensions and changing life around Inuit communities in one of the planet’s most extreme and challenging places.