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Volume CXXXII, Number 10 |
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Inuit art adorns museum walls
MACAELA FLANAGAN
STAFF WRITER
"The Power of Thought" is a historical, sociological, artistic, and very personal exhibition. The unadorned use of color and line, and the simplistic beauty that Oonark captures, reveals a particular sincerity in her imagery. Despite the lucid charm of her images, the prints also have an underlying complexity. They are personal stories of Oonark's faith and life, issues that reach deep into the rich colors of her prints.
In an exhibition that samples prints from her twenty-year artistic career, Bowdoin's Museum of Art is now showing "The Power of Thought: The Prints of Jessie Oonark." The exhibtion is largely an exploration of her Inuit heritage.
Oonark was born in the Back River region of the central arctic in Canada. She lived a traditional, semi-nomadic existence until the late 1950s when she was forced onto a government-sponsored settlement in Baker Lake, Nunavut as caribou, her main source of food, became depleted.
Oonark's prints explore issues concerning identity and time-feelings best portrayed by the use of color, shape, visual symbols, and line. The prints explore a range of subjects including people, animals, shamanistic symbols, and images pertaining to hunting and food. The prints consist of a variety of colors, though many tend towards bright reds, blues, and yellows. The works, reprinted by various artists, come from a variety of mediums such as stencils, stonecuts, linocuts, and silkscreens. There are also examples of contemporary Inuit carvers' works in cases at the back of the gallery.
The intriguing title piece of the exhibition is a 1976 silkscreen printed by William Ukpatiku. It reads: "The Power of Thought symbolizes the transformations of desire into thoughts and of thoughts into visible, physical objects." Among other things, this refers to the amulets in the print, which are described as expressions of the Shaman's thoughts. In her art, Oonark abstracted these amulets into different shapes and colors and sent them circling and spiraling around the shaman's head.
The exhibition and international tour have been organized by the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums, and guest curated by Marie Bouchard. Bouchard gave a lecture in Beam classroom on Thursday afternoon titled "From Thoughts to Art: the Prints of Jessie Oonark." Bouchard, a Canadian Art Historian, spent over ten years living in the same Inuit settlement at Baker Lake in the Canadian Arctic where Oonark resided.
"The Power of Thought: The Prints of Jessie Oonark" will be on display in the Halford Gallery at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art until December 22, 2002.
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