en-ca SC0266-API1-PR-1

en-ca Newnham - Building B - Level 2 - Hallway toward the Library

en-ca Pitseolak Ashoona (1904-1983)

en-ca Young Bears

en-ca 1977

en-ca Print

en-ca Stonecut

en-ca Stencil

en-ca 52.1 x 65.4 cm

en-ca 46/50

en-ca "I draw the old ways, the things we did long before there were many white men." (Pitseolak Ashoona)

en-ca Pitseolak Ashoona was among the first generation of Cape Dorset artists. Encouraged by James Houston “to draw the old ways”, Pitseolak was self-taught and, like her contemporaries, developed a style uniquely her own.

Young Bears exemplifies characteristics typical of so many early Dorset prints: lack of a figure/ground relationship; multi-perspective — each of the three groups of bears is seen, simultaneously, from a slightly different perspective. And if this image, in its apparent simplicity, recalls the drawings of young children, it is for very good reason. Before we learn to write, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter argues, we inhabit “acoustic space”, a codification of reality also associated with hunting and gathering (preliterate) societies. He elaborates that, in opposition to visual space (space created by the eye): “Auditory space (space created by the ear) has no point of favoured focus. It's a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background.” This is Pitseolak’s world. This is what informs her art. (David Phillips, Seneca Polytechnic)

en-ca Purchased from Mazelow Gallery.

en-ca Signed bottom right corner, Pitseolak (and syllabics signature)

Seneca Art