Lot 90
MANASIE AKPALIAPIK Lᓇᓯ ᐊᐸᓕᐊᐱ (b. 1955)
Additional Images
Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist, ca. 2000
Note:
We are pleased to present six exceptional works by Manasie Akpaliapik in this auction. Purchased directly from the artist in the mid-late 1990s, each represents a significant element of the artist’s practice, exemplifying the fertility of imagination and astounding range of technical achievement for which he has become known.
Carved in low relief, in Mask with Seal Spirit, Manasie, working with shamanic imagery traditional to the Western Arctic, has carved a representation of a mask bedecked with an attendant spirit. Two outswept hands flank an image of a seal, each with incised circles on their palms. Such circular engravings on appendages are often present on shamanic masks. In 1880 during his time among the Indigenous inhabitants of the Bering Strait, Edward Wilson Nelson recorded that the “hole was placed in the palm so that the spirit of a bird would release the game, permitting the hunter to obtain it.” [1]
The mask-like form has been carved from an exceptional slab of naturally-occurring red catlinite, a stone with sacred associations, long employed primarily by central North American Indigenous peoples in the fabrication of bowls for ceremonial smoking pipes.
(1) Dorothy Jean Ray, Eskimo Masks Art and Ceremony, (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1975), 67
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