This is the Final Week to View 'Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds and Lineages and landbases'

This week marks the final week to see Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds and lineages and land bases, with the last day of the exhibitions on August 30.

Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds brings together a selection of 36 works on paper produced by Shuvinai Ashoona over the past two decades. Celebrated for her highly personal and imaginative iconography that combines earthly and extraterrestrial realms, Mapping Worlds is a vital representation of this third-generation Inuk artist's work.

Ashoona's drawings in ink, graphite and coloured pencils demonstrate her wide-ranging interests in narratives that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, past and future. Influenced by her environment and fed by her fascination with horror films, comic books and television, Ashoona references traditional Inuit iconography from everyday life to the mythic; offering strange and fantastical visions that evoke altered states of mind.

Ashoona's work speaks to anxieties about the future related to resource extraction and our fears of the unknown, the monstrous and the "other," yet her artwork does not depict humans in opposition to the otherworldly. Her brightly coloured drawings teem with life, and while the Inuit community occasionally clashes with the artist's creatures, more often than not they co-exist harmoniously. Ashoona's work has become a vision for dialogue on the effects of climate change in the northern hemisphere, the role popular culture plays in Arctic communities and the ways in which Inuit art and artists are represented within Canada and abroad.

Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds is organized and circulated by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. The exhibition is curated by Nancy Campbell, PhD, with assistance from Justine Kohleal, Assistant Curator, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

lineages and land bases presents a new perspective on the work and lives of Sophie Frank and Emily Carr, two women artists important to BC's history. The exhibition explores differing ideas of selfhood and its relation to the natural world, revealing how worldviews are informed by culture, history and experience. lineages and land bases extends its exploration of nature and culture through contemporary artists that sought new ways to represent their relation to the world around them.Artists include Kenojuak Ashevak, Carl Beam, Karin Bubaš, Edward Burtynsky, Robert Davidson, Patricia Deadman, Christos Dikeakos, Michael Drebert, Julie Duschenes, Lorraine Gilbert, Jochen Gerz, Brian Jungen, Zacharias Kunuk, Mike MacDonald, Landon Mackenzie, Liz Magor, Al McWilliams, Marian Penner Bancroft, Ed Pien, Bill Reid, Arnold Shives, Simon Tookoome, Jeff Wall, Jin-me Yoon and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.

lineages and land bases is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, with Sa??wx̱wú7mesh advisors Chief Bill Williams and Tracy Williams.

To book tickets: visit vanartgallery.bc.ca

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