Annie Pootoogook: Kinngait Composition by Jan Allen

square 8vo. pp. 77. profusely illustrated. paperback wrappers (front cover bit scuffed, lower corner bit creased from in-store handling, otherwise new). Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University, [2011].

ISBN-10: 1553392604 / ISBN-13: 9781553392606

With drawings spanning 2001 to 2006, this publication focuses on Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, the Arctic community that has been the focus of Annie Pootoogook's practice. Recasting the artistic traditions of the renowned West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative Ltd. (now Kinngait Co-op), Pootoogook vividly conveys 21st-century realities of the life in the settlement. While her drawings offer unflinching documentation of life in a community in transition, she also bears witness to the bonds among its people. In her work, we see Pootoogook's approach refined and applied to the elements of daily life in domestic interiors, community activities, supernatural incidents and interpersonal conflict. In the context of the broad popular appeal of Inuit graphics, these works are distinguished by a disconcerting emotional reserve. The artist achieves a cool observational quality that pushes at the edges of comedy or hysteria, a condition of charged understatement that has drawn intense critical interest to her work.