Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Homage to Pudlo Pudlat


 
Drawing by Pudlo Pudlat 

At its heart, this conversation is centered on encounters, from the artist Arvo Leo’s chance discovery of a book about one of the most prolific, yet little known artists in Canada, to Pudlo Pudlat’s own drawings, over 4000 renderings that reveal the Arctic landscape as a site of transition, a region that from 1940s onward, was inundated with new technologies, new religion, and ideas that radically changed the way of life for those in the far north. Looking critically at the conditions of production, the conversation will provide a background on the development of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in the 1950s. In a place where paper currency was a relatively recent introduction, the program introduced art-making as a means to replace incomes lost after the collapse of the fur trade. Collectively, Pudlat’s drawings reveal a cosmology. In them, fish pull airplanes, humans ride muskox, and seals have the ability to teleport to the sky. Arvo Leo's encounters in Cape Dorset extend these readings of Pudlo's world as drawings transfigure into a fresh interrogation of landforms, community practices and the rhythm of Inuktitut songs. By way of acoustically and visually engaging with scenes of daily life, human-animal relations and intricate contingencies of the Canadian Arctic in a time of ecological shift, Fish Plane, Heart Clock unravels an organic correspondence between the camera and the drawing. Candice Hopkins and Natasha Ginwala
Candice Hopkins and Natasha Ginwala discuss the work of Arvo Leo and Pudlo Pudlat.
27/09/2015 3 pm
La Loge, Brussels