To Remain Connected ARTtalk with curators Jenny Irene Miller, Raven Moffett and Shauna Caldwell, moderated by Mary Anne Redding
To Remain Connected: Jenny Irene Miller, Raven Moffett and Shauna Caldwell, Guest Curators
Dec 3, 2021 - May 7, 2022 | Turchin Center for the Visual Arts
By bringing together work grounded in Inuit artmaking across generations, as well as through multifaceted and evolving practices, we hope to kindle conversations around the meaningful stories that are deeply rooted in community and placemaking and engage with ongoing legacies of creation. The featured artworks were selected because of the stories they tell and the connections they visualize. Our curatorial model stems from an embrace of the collective and highlights community through thoughtful portraiture as well as collaborative, familial and multigenerational art making. To Remain Connected presents rich layers of stories told through a multitude of interwoven voices rooted in land, memory and Inuit ways of being. While Inuit are linked together through art, language, food, and more, there are many unique Inuit communities, dialects, and lifeways across lands that have been renamed Alaska, Russia, Greenland, Canada and beyond.
An in-depth look at the contemporary work of Jenny Irene Miller provides a multi-media, sensory experience that draws us close through intimate images of archival materials, the community she belongs to, and the landscapes of Kiŋigin (Wales, Alaska), where her family’s stories and roots originate. In beautifully self-reflective sound and video pieces, Jenny creates space to actively employ Indigenous refusal through close consideration of the access viewers are given while simultaneously nurturing a sense of greater familial connection to land and kin.
Through the artwork of Mabel Nigiyok and mother/daughter team Elsie and Helen Klengenberg, who worked together as part of an artist cooperative in Ulukhaqtuuq (Inuvik, Canada), we see celebrations of community through music, connections between human and non-human kin and mutual relationships to the land. The familial bonds of Lypa Pitsiulak, Annie Pitsiulak, Thomasie Alikatuktuk and Solomon Karpik further broadens their works’ emphasis on joy and healing in their lives within ᐸᖕᓂᖅᑑᖅ ᓄᓇᕗᑦ (Pangnirtung, Nunavut).
In sharing these expansive and interconnected visual stories, this exhibition attempts to shift the pervasive and incomplete narrative that has long been supported by the colonial framework within which arts institutions, such as ours, are so deeply embedded.
Featured artists:
Jenny Irene Miller
Mabel Nigiyok
Elsie Klengenberg
Helen Klengenberg
Lypa Pitsiulak
Annie Pitsiulak
Thomasie Alikatuktuk
Solomon Karpik
