Sunday Afternoon
$500.00
Available
Description
Condition: No condition to be noted.
Description by Artist: No description by artist found.
Notes from DaVic Gallery: This is a very powerful and relevant print representing the new life of the Inuit in settlements and the new generation youth living in them. Most Inuit prints in this gallery, represent the life of the Inuit in the old ways, nomadic, brave, hunter, always in danger. This is a small sample of their new life, in settlements. No caribou parka or amauti, no seal-skin boots, just jeans, a blouse, a sweater. Makeshift houses and streets in disarray, but they all live and work together generating economy to help them buy the things they need for survival. No use of negative space representing the vast emptiness of the land; no Inuksuit in the horizon to guide them or help them trap caribou. Instead, houses, electricity posts, houses, construction … the white empty space is no longer needed and used here, in their new life… She, however, doesn’t know that, other than by the stories that the elders tell, “the way it used to be in the old ways.”
The first Hudson’s Bay Company Arctic post was established in 1909 in Arctic Quebec and continued expanding year over year in different locations across the arctic primarily for the trade of white fox fur with the Inuit. Eventually the Inuit became fully involved as trappers in the fox fur trade. There was a period in the Inuit way of life the heavily depended and relied in the fur trade heavily impacting their nomadic life for animal hunting.
In 1950 a great famine and devastation of Inuit villages forced camps into government established settlements. Few camps remained that eventually all nomadic life ceased and into settlements in a new life economy driven.
The author, Kudluajuk Ashoona, was born in 1958 (see artist’s biography page) and likely never experienced or lived the “Old Ways” that she may remember. What she presents is Inuit life today with no trace of the “Old Ways”. With the fast changes to Inuit life in the last century, no doubt that in a near future, this very representation of Inuit life today will be remembered with nostalgia as “The Old Ways” and this girl, when old, will share her stories with her grandchildren.