With his white T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and sunglasses pushed to the top of his head, Jutai Toonoo looks a lot like a Gastown tourist browsing through the shops and galleries on Water Street. In this case, however, the venue is the Marion Scott Gallery, and the works he's looking over are his own-32 highly expressive stone sculptures the Cape Dorset artist has produced since 2000.

"I am a tourist," Toonoo says with a laugh when we're introduced. Although he has travelled with his art to Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, this is his first visit to Vancouver. More importantly, Life Forms: Jutai Toonoo in Cape Dorset is his first solo show. "I'm very nervous," he says, indicating the butterflies in his stomach. "I can't really take criticism."

His anxiety is misplaced but understandable. Toonoo pulls difficult feelings out of himself when he carves, and, when he exhibits, exposes his naked soul to the marketplace. His work is quite distinct from our cultural preconceptions of what Inuit art should look like. The sculptures are executed in serpentinite, local to the Cape Dorset area, yet there are no images of Arctic animals here-no seals, no caribou, no polar bears-nor are there depictions of legendary creatures or shamanic transformations. No hunting scenes, no fishing scenes, no representations of Inuit people in fur-lined parkas and sealskin boots. Instead, the gallery is filled with bare human faces and figures.

Many of the faces are carved in multiple configurations, conjoined in surreal ways, curved around, above, and beside each other, or facing in opposite directions, Janus-like. Instead of depicting the traditional Inuit way of life, or even that life in transition, Toonoo has taken on a universal theme: the human condition. At the same time, his art is extremely personal. "I try to give power to my work," he says. "Lots of times, my tongue gets tied and I can't really say what I'm thinking." The silent stone gives him eloquence.

Carving intuitively and spontaneously (his few attempts to work from sketches have failed), Toonoo reveals feelings, beliefs, observations, and experiences through his sculpture. Very often, he says, he names the stone and recognizes-rather than composes-what it is about as he is working on it. A collective narrative emerges, too. "I looked at a list of titles of my carvings one time and it looked like a story," Toonoo says. "When I saw that, it blew me away."

The Messenger is a big head with deeply incised, wide-open eyes, knit brows, and a large hand with pointing index finger poised above. A smaller face with closed eyes and open mouth is carved on the reverse. "One day I woke up in a morgue, in Iqaluit, with a toe tag on," Toonoo recounts. Ten years ago, during minor surgery, his heart stopped. He was declared dead and wheeled away. Toonoo describes his near-death experience, the sensation that his body was made of jelly, that he had no bones, no legs, no arms, no hands. He heard a booming voice behind him, telling him he never had to work again-and he was very, very happy. "It's the best thing that can happen to a person," he says now. "To die."

His sculptures often convey complex psychological states, including his feelings of sadness, discouragement, and homeliness (in one of the carvings, Toonoo depicts himself as a gargoyle), his strong connection with his wife and eight sons, his respect for women, his scorn for politicians, his anger at the apathy and substance abuse in his community, his strong religious convictions. He also reflects on what he has seen on TV, including the O.?J. Simpson trial and images of Muslim women swathed in veils or chadors. "In most cultures," he observes simply, "men make the rules."

Born in 1959 in a camp on Baffin Island, Toonoo led a seminomadic existence with his family until the age of eight or nine, when the group settled in Cape Dorset. He learned to carve as a child, watching his father and using his tools. (His father, who died in 1969, was the sculptor Toonoo Toonoo, and his older sister, Ovilu Tunnillie, is also a renowned Cape Dorset artist.) "I didn't know I was making art then," Jutai says of his early experience of carving. "I was just doing something that my father was doing." He was middle-aged and had worked in the Cape Dorset municipal office and for the Nunavut Court of Justice before he considered the possibility that he might be an artist. It wasn't until the late 1990s, however, after a 10-year dry spell, that he focused on sculpting full-time. "I've never had plans," he says, laughing again. "It kind of happened." More seriously, he adds that having this solo exhibition has been a revelation for him. "I'm starting to see what I'm doing."