Gallery honours Annie Pootoogook
SAW Gallery names studio after Cape Dorset artist and frequent exhibitor
John McFadden
Northern News Services
Monday, May 22, 2017
OTTAWA
Annie Pootoogook's legacy was already safe and secure, but now the Cape Dorset artist will be immortalized by Ottawa's SAW Gallery, which is naming an artist studio after her.
Annie Pootoogook - who died at 47 in September 2016 - will have a new artists' studio named after her at Ottawa's SAW Gallery. - NNSL file photo |
Pootoogook died under tragic circumstances in September 2016. She was 47.
The 'Annie Pootoogook Studio' artist's space is set to open in July 2018, gallery curator Jason St-Laurent said.
He said the decision to name the space after Pootoogook was easy.
"We had over the past five years worked with Annie on multiple exhibitions and projects. We knew her while she was on the street. We worked with her as an artist. We commissioned her to make work, and we had a professional relationship with her over these years," St-Laurent said. "When this tragedy happened, we got together and tried to think of a way to permanently memorialize her within our new facility."
He said the studio is part of an ambitious plan to increase it's size five-fold, including the 1,000 sq. ft. Nordic Lab, which will connect Nunavut to Scandinavian and other Nordic communities by way of Ottawa.
"We have been working with Inuit organizations and Inuk artists for many years now and we thought this would be an opportunity for us to formalize something that would be a permanent feature of our centre," said St-Laurent.
The new Nordic Lab will be a research and production space where Northern artists can share their inspirational stories of the North- the good, bad, and ugly -with other artists.
The SAW Gallery has partnered with the Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association for the Nordic Lab. Association spokesperson Kathleen Nicholls, who is from Ottawa, said it will be an excellent opportunity for Nunavut artists.
"We are always looking for more artistic and professional opportunities for artists. One of the ways artists develop is to go to a new place and meet new people and develop new skills and then bring them back and use them where they live," Nicholls said. "(Nunavut artists) don't have as many resources as artists in Ottawa might have, so we are trying to establish those things. To have the studio named after Annie is really nice to make the program stand out and make that connection to her known."
SAW Gallery was founded in 1973, and has been located inside downtown Ottawa's old courthouse building since the 1990s. The gallery expansion will be done, St-Laurent said, by utilizing existing space in the historic but once-abandoned building, which was built in the late 1800s.
St-Laurent said Pootoogook had been a fixture at the gallery for years, but her work really caught the attention of the international art world after she won the $50,000 Sobey Art Award, Canada's foremost art prize for artists under 40, in 2006.
"That really catapulted her work into the national and even international spotlight. Her work was included in some fairly large international art events," St-Laurent said.
"From there, her career really took off. Her work is now in some very major collections."
St-Laurent said that Pootoogook's chalk and ink drawings often depict the darker side of humans, particularly those in the North.
"Her subject matter was very groundbreaking in the sense that she veered away from most of the traditions of art-making in the North and decided to put her gaze on very personal and sometimes heartbreaking situations. She drew the world around her - warts and all," he said. "She broached the subjects of domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse - all things that were quite revolutionary to represent in art."
St-Laurent said that Annie was very humble about her work - it was a personal labour of love. He thinks that the pressures she felt to produce after she won the award may have contributed to the social problems she experienced afterwards.
St-Laurent said the Nordic Lab will have a social agency element in that it will host homeless youth for workshops and other cultural programs.
"We want to use the Nordic Lab, which is located near the downtown shelters, as a place to give people a leg up," St-Laurent said.
"That's the way we want to remember Annie is to try to do something for the people on the street that she called her family. I think she'd be proud to be associated with something like this."
