Cape Dorset (May 23/05) - Cape Dorset artist Annie Pootoogook will share the spotlight with her late mother, artist Napachie Pootoogook, in a show opening in Toronto at the Feheley Fine Arts gallery on June 11.

Annie Pootoogook, 36 is an artist who brings contemporary Inuit life to paper using pencil and pencil crayons. - photo courtesy of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative

"I am very excited to be doing a show with my mom," said Annie in a phone interview from the West Baffin Eskimo Co-op last week.

Napachie, the only daughter of famed Cape Dorset artist Pitseolak Ashoona, died in 2002.

As a little girl, Annie watched her grandmother, Pitseolak, draw every day. But it took a long time for Annie to get into the art world herself. She lived her life, often experiencing hardship and pain that occasionally makes its way into her work.

Annie, who was born in 1969, started to seriously draw pictures from her life in 1997. She uses pencil first, then black pen, then bright pencil crayons to create images she knows well from her life -- things she sees around her on a daily basis.

She names Kenojuak Ashevak as a major inspiration, despite the different styles.

Annie says she also likes looking at magazines every now and then, but essentially her pictures come from her.

Annie says she is not nervous about the show, mainly because she is sharing the gallery space with her mother's work, a first for her.

The curator of the Toronto show, Patricia Feheley, wrote in a recent article that Annie's work should be no more surprising today than the radically abstracted style of Tiktak's sculpture would have been to Inuit art viewers in the 1960s.

"While aware of the southern audience for her drawings, Annie rarely creates work that conforms to conventional expectations about the look or feel of 'Inuit' art," Feheley said.

"Her subjects are not Arctic animals or scenes of nomadic existence from a time before settlement life."

Annie captures her own life - lying on her bed for example, a line up at the Co-op store, or a room in her house - with a totally unpretentious eye.

Depicting life as she sees it is something her mother and grandmother also did in their time, and gained international fame for.

Annie just hopes people like her drawings.

When asked what advice her mother gave her, Annie thought for a moment, then said, "Never give up. That's what she said. Because if you give up, you never do anything."

The Power Plant in Toronto, another well-respected, popular art gallery, is preparing a show of Annie's work in 2006.