Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook, of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, is seen here in a still from a 2005 documentary. She was found dead on Sept. 19 in Ottawa.]
Prominent Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook has been identified as the woman whose body was found in Ottawa’s Rideau River earlier this week.
Officials with the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in her hometown, Cape Dorset, Nunavut, confirmed the death of the chalk-and-ink artist, who rose to prominence when she won the Sobey Award in 2006.
Pootoogook, 47, had been living in Ottawa.
Her drawings offered a contemporary take on her culture, where old customs intermingled with modern technology and goods.
Her work is part of the collections at the National Gallery of Canada and the Ontario Gallery of Art and was recently part of an exhibition on Indigenous pop art at Ottawa’s Saw Gallery.
“Her inclusion in the exhibition was a no-brainer, in that she looked at contemporary life in a way no other artist had ever done,” said Saw Gallery curator Jason St-Laurent, who first met Pootoogook five years ago.
[IMAGE:
Fine Liner Eyebrow one of Pootoogook’s drawings on display at the National Gallery of Canada.]
In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones…
Someone always says it, whenever it comes up: “I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!”
Well. Yes. It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote all us women and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone ever again.
This vote is legally binding.
Yes, of course, all women know each other, the way you always suspected. (Incidentally, so do Canadians. I’m just throwing that out there.) We went into the women’s room at the Applebee’s at the corner of 54 and all the others streamed in through the doors into that endless liminal space, a chain of humans stretching backward heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites, Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child. We sat around in the couches in the women’s room (I know you’ve always been suspicious of those couches) and chatted with each other in the secret female language that you always knew existed. Somebody set up a Playstation– the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart and Cleopatra never learned to lose and a woman who ruled an empire that fell when the Sea People came and left no trace can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument.
Eventually we took the vote. You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained. It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee’s since the beginning of recorded time. And then we went back to playing Mario Kart and Hoelun took off her bra and we didn’t think about you again except that I had to carry this message.
So anyway good luck with that it’s just as you always said it was. Hush now, no talking
Just occasionally I feel slightly settled. I still have to catch myself and remind myself that I live here. This is home now.
Coming back to our apartment does feel like home, kinda. It’s not decorated the way we would decorate (I know Americans, at least in the PNW seem to love brown, I still don’t). It’s not our style of building. But it’s got our stuff laid out in a cozy way.
So that feels much better.
But now even outside, the americanness of it doesn’t make me feel weird, the post mail boxes on sticks outside everyone’s houses, the low-lying buildings, mainly single story… it’s becoming background to where I live.
I still flash back to random things, the railway station in Windsor, the streets of terraced brick, and have a ‘wow, I really don’t live in the UK any more’ moment. And they’re still pretty frequent.
But as I lay on our sofa I think, hey, I’m home. With my love. And that’s good.
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You have the right to worry, my friend. if you live in a society where idiots are famous and no one cares about the intellectuals.
I appear to have traded a job where my availability was horrendous because my hours were all over the place, and where I was exhausted from switching from days to nights all the time to one where I am exhausted from working an improbable number of hours in each week. At least for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited by the new job, and it’s fun teaching. But I’m knackered already and it’s only day two…
