Shape-shifting landscape beautiful and foreboding

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This article was published 30/11/2023 (1018 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When one lingers on Robert Kautuk’s 2020 work Ice Break (instead of Iceberg), an aerial photograph layered over a light box, the sea ice starts to shapeshift into other things.

It looks like a fragment of bone, a whale’s vertebrae perhaps, stark white against an inky pool of darkness. Or it looks like a rock hurtling through outer space, a Star Wars set piece leaving behind a constellation of stars in its aquamarine wake.

Sea ice is a dynamic photography subject. It’s also a dramatic harbinger of climate change.

Both of those ideas come together in Dark Ice, a touring exhibition by the Ottawa Art Gallery on view now at WAG-Qaumajuq.

Curated by the OAG’s Rebecca Basciano, Dark Ice features the work of Kautuk, a Kangiqtugaapik, Nunavut-based photographer who uses drones to capture aerial photographs and videos of his community, and Ottawa’s Leslie Reid, an established painter and photographer whose work focuses on the North.

A sense of urgency hums through Dark Ice. The effects of climate change are intensely visual up north, which makes them much more difficult to ignore.

“I think a lot of people down south can just slough it off,” Basciano says over the phone from Ottawa. “But Inuit are at the forefront of what is happening and they’re seeing these changes a lot more rapidly.

“The problem is, a lot of researchers go up north and gather all this data, and then don’t share it with those communities.”

This, Basciano points out, is a lingering effect of colonization, where knowledge becomes yet another resource to extract.

Projects, even well-meaning ones, might be set up without community consultation, or they disturb wildlife instead of observing it.

Basciano hopes the exhibition can be an example of a way forward, a dialogue between North and South, Inuit and settlers.

“Hopefully, the images grip the visitor and draw them into a conversation that’s very complex,” she says.

Neither artist had worked together or exhibited together prior to Dark Ice. Kautuk works at the Ittaq Heritage and Research Centre, where he encourages Inuit-led research.

Reid, meanwhile, has conducted research in the Arctic through the Canadian Forces Artists Program and the Canada C3 expedition. While the pair bring different perspectives to their shared subject matter, their works are in seamless conversation with each other.

Basciano had been talking to Reid about showing her northern-focused work.

“Her father was an RCAF pilot who took aerial mapping pictures of the North, so she’s always had this in her mind to retrace his flights and delve into this.”

Neither Reid nor Basciano was interested in telling the story of climate change in the North without including an Inuit perspective.

“We would just be following the footsteps of the past, instead of making a change,” Basciano says.

And so, Basciano tapped Kautuk, whose work she was familiar with — particularly his aerial shot of hunters preparing walruses, the bright-red blood cutting dramatic swaths over the snow and pooling in the water like a bruise. (That 2016 piece, After Cutting Up Two Walruses, Iglulik, is on view in Dark Ice.)

Right away, he was on board.

“Robert has never been a part of an exhibition before, in the sense that he had never printed his work,” Basciano says. “He’s so used to seeing images digitally or as part of magazines and newspapers. He’s been on the cover of Inuit Art Quarterly, we’ve seen his work everywhere, but it’s really hard to print up north.”

Dark Ice uses light boxes to striking effect; the backlit glow through the ice adds another dimension to the photographs.

Basciano urges viewers to look for those contrasts.

“There’s light and dark, fragility and strength. There’s cycles — geological cycles, but also seasons, day and night. I think the beauty comes through in the contrasts,” she says.

Basciano will be hosting a curator talk tonight at 6 p.m. at WAG-Qaumajuq, with light refreshments served beforehand. The event is open to the public and included with regular admission.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com