At Marion Scott Gallery until January 9

Qavavau Manumie’s drawings encompass the abstract and the representational, the mystical and the prosaic. His images speak of fantastical creatures, supernatural encounters, and the closely observed particulars of daily life in the Far North. Delicately and meticulously rendered in coloured pencil, graphite, and ink, his subjects include landscapes, seascapes, people, tools, transport, camp scenes, and creatures of the land, sea, and air. At the same time, this Cape Dorset artist may fragment and recombine aspects of all these subjects in ways that, to southern audiences, look quite surreal. In an untitled work of 2008, for instance, human and animal heads in profile are pressed against the wobbly and abstracted blades of an airplane propeller. Bubbles drift upward across the kaleidoscopic image, as if we were viewing a weird conjoining of the organic and the mechanical from an underwater chamber.

The dreamlike disjunctions in Manumie’s art may perhaps be linked to the disruptions of his early life—or perhaps more simply and directly to the hybrid nature of contemporary Inuit existence, with its melding of the traditional and the modern, the familiar and the strange. Manumie was born in 1958, not in his home community but in Brandon, Manitoba, where his mother was being treated for tuberculosis. He spent his early years with a foster family in Brandon before moving, at the age of five or six, to Cape Dorset with his mother. As a young man, Manumie became an immensely accomplished printer for the Kinngait Studios, translating other artists’ drawings into stonecuts. He also began to produce his own drawings, which have brought him considerable national acclaim and which align him with a third generation of Inuit artists whose works cannot be fixed within stereotypes of form or subject. Still, his drawings reveal his great familiarity with and understanding of Arctic wildlife.

Manumie’s compositions also evince the attention he has paid to recent western art history and popular culture. His drawings are untitled and he is reportedly reluctant to discuss his work. However, by gentle questioning of the artist, through a translator, Marion Scott Gallery’s Robert Kardosh has been able to glean some insights into his imagery. (See Kardosh’s short essay, available in the gallery or online.)

One of the recurring subjects in this show is the “little people” or Inugagulligaq who, according to the stories Manumie’s father told him as a child, live among the Inuit, largely unseen. In a 2009 drawing, the diminutive beings, dressed in sealskin parkas, trousers, and boots, make their way through a zigzaggy maze that appears to be composed of metal panels riveted together. In another work, a little person bends forward under the weight of the enormous (i.e. human-size) knife he is carrying on his back, while dragging away a couple of equally enormous pieces of kelp with him.

Kelp blades and stipes, along with a smattering of stones, are also used as a framing device for a small landscape depicting a camp scene. As Kardosh notes, this picture within a picture is postmodernly self-reflective, addressing the “mediated nature of pictorial representation”. The same kind of device is used in another, somewhat smaller scene of sea ice and ice floes, the small rectangle set within a much larger frame of organic and geometric abstractions, and lines scored with Xs. The whole is viewed through a screen of small circles, which might be snowflakes or might be bubbles again. As with so many other works here, the effect is surreal, sophisticated—and thoroughly engaging.