Additional Images

Provenance:

Joram Piatigorsky, Maryland;
Private collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

An accomplished self-taught painter, sculptor, and instructor originally from Tuktoyaktuk, North West Territories, artist Bill Nasogaluak’s artworks have been garnering notable curatorial attention in recent years. [1,2]

Nasogaluak has created a body of distinctive, socially conscious artworks whose images draw on Inuit Shamanism and mythology, and both Inuit and Western art historical traditions to investigate a wide range of the artist’s experience. Artworks confront issues as diverse as climate change, self-harm, depression, and the impacts of industry in the North.

Nasogaluak’s artworks often contain allusions to personal experiences, sometimes emotionally fraught, including the alcoholism and death of a cousin by suicide. [3] These subjects so often accompanied by shame, self-abasement, or deflection in public discourse are confronted by Nasogaluak with an uncommon openness and sometimes startling directness.

In the important work White Demons Stealing Inuit Souls, Nasogaluak presents what is perhaps his most unflinching, and certainly his most caustic rebuke of the negative effects of Southern expansion into the North. A stark black F-15 fighter jet drops a barrage of liquor bottles in place of bombs on a prospective target below. Protruding from the cockpit of the plane, and indistinguishable from its body except by colour sits the face of a dispassionate white pilot. The image is laden with symbolism, evoking traditional Inuit images of transformation in a menacing parody of Euro-Canadian supply planes often perceived as lifelines in Northern communities. [4]

For a closely related and contemporaneous work, part of the collection of Samuel & Esther Sarick at Art Gallery of Ontario, see the ongoing exhibit Bill Nasogaluak.

(1) Art Gallery of Ontario, “Bill Nasogaluak” 2021-Ongoing, Click here to read more
(2) PR Newswire, Bill Nasogaluak: Shapeshifter, FFA, January 2020. Click here to read more
(3) Bill Nasogaluak, Interview with Feheley Fine Arts, 26 March 2020. Accessed February 21, 2022. Click here to read more
(4) Nathan Baker, “Bush Flying in Canada”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Accessed April 10, 2022. Click here to read more


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