Image: Winnipeg Art Gallery
The Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq is presenting 'Omalluq: Pictures from my Life', an exhibition of work by Kinngait artist Omalluq Oshutsiaq, whose drawings were made in the last two years of her life. The show opened April 27, 2024, and is scheduled to remain on view until March 1, 2027 at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq in Winnipeg.
According to WAG-Qaumajuq, the exhibition centers on 19 drawings purchased by the Gallery in 2015, along with one carving already in the collection. Oshutsiaq, who lived from 1948 to 2014, was one of the few female artists from Kinngait to gain international recognition for her carvings. Her career in that medium ended in the mid-1990s after an accident with an electric grinder, and she began drawing only in 2013, with encouragement from Kinngait Studio director Bill Ritchie.
The exhibition foregrounds how quickly Oshutsiaq developed a distinctive body of late drawings. Her first two drawings in 2013 depict her daughter, Mary, and her injured hand in a work titled 'Broken Hands, Personal Experience'. In the two years before her death, Oshutsiaq created the drawings now on view, giving the exhibition its focus on an artist who discovered a new medium late in life and used it to record memory, family, and lived experience.
WAG-Qaumajuq describes the drawings as ranging from detailed narratives of community life to images shaped by mythology and personal remembrance. Three works interpret the south Baffin story of the female shaman Aliguq and her seaweed helping spirits. Another is a tribute to her husband, Simionie, who died in 2012; in that drawing, Oshutsiaq depicts herself as a weeping presence above his grave, marked 'SIM' and his dates, 1943–2012.
The gallery says the exhibition is the most significant collection of Oshutsiaq’s late drawings. It emphasizes the breadth of her thematic interests and the drawing skill visible in a medium she only began to explore in the final two years of her life. The exhibition is curated by Darlene Coward Wight, WAG-Qaumajuq Curator of Inuit Art.
'Omalluq: Pictures from my Life' is listed among the exhibitions on view at WAG-Qaumajuq, alongside other current and upcoming projects in the Gallery’s permanent collection galleries and exhibition program. The venue for the exhibition is Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq, 300 Memorial Blvd, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
