Jesse Tungilik ÒUsing Conceptual Sculpture to Bring Social ChangeÓ (transcript) Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures April 2, 2019 Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) video available at http://indigenousfutures.net/outputs/ifcp/#tungilik info@abtec.org Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents in collaboration with The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project: Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership and the Faculty of Fine Arts Jesse Tungilik Interdisciplinary artist based in Iqaluit, Nunavut Concordia University 2 April 2019 Produced by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures in collaboration with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC)Êabtec.org/iif. 0:00:16 Skawennati: I am the co-director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the partnership coordinator of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. We are among, yeah... They're gonna talk about that. [laughter] 0:00:30 S: I wanted to say that I am also Mohawk, so I get to welcome you Jesse, to my territory and the land we call Tiohtiˆ:ke in Kanien'keh‡ ka, my language. And it's very wonderful to have you here and I'm glad you're gonna be here for a longer time because I haven't gotten to really hang out and benefit from all that you bring to this place. So, we welcome you on behalf of IIF and AbTeC and you all for coming. 0:01:01 Jesse Tungilik: Thank you. 0:01:03 Jason Lewis: And so, I'm Jason Lewis. I'm Professor of Design and Computation Arts here, I'm the co-director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace with Skawennati and the Director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. There's a lot of labels going on. [laughter] 0:01:18 JL: And then with Heather, I co-direct the Indigenous Futures cluster in the research institute up on the 10th and 11th floor. And this is part of the Indigenous Futures Clusters Presents speaker series, which is where we invite people that we've invited into town for various things to talk about their work, particularly indigenous artists and, but then also people who've been invited by other folks. It's our way of sort of creating a public dialogue about Indigenous Arts, Indigenous Futurisms and sort of, kind of all things indigenous that come through and will continue to come through so I welcome you all, and I want to turn it over to the splendid Dr Igloliorte. 0:02:05 Dr Heather Igloliorte: Thank you. Alright. For your third introduction before we get to the main event. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce my dear colleague Jesse Tungilik who is, as Jason just said, our co... Our tri-co artist in residence for this semester. 0:02:25 HI: Jesse Tungilik is an interdisciplinary artist based in Iqaluit, Nunavut. He has worked in many artistic disciplines, starting as a ceramicist at the Matchbox Gallery in Rankin Inlet, when he was just eight years old, continuing into adulthood before working in Matthew Nuqingaq's Aayuraa? 0:02:46 Jesse Tungilik: Aayuraa. 0:02:47 HI: Aayuraa Studio in Iqaluit as a jewelry artist specializing in baleen, muskox horn, ivory and silver. And I'll pause right there and say that Jesse, this is the first of a series of talks and events that Jesse is a part of and one of them is going to be a workshop for our faculty and students in the department of Fine Arts that's gonna take place in the art hive on the... Go to the website. [laughter] 0:03:12 HI: And he's gonna be talking about how to work with natural materials, so he's gonna be doing a demo with muskox horn, so if you're interested in working in antler and other natural medium as a jeweller, Jesse has worked with all of that stuff. Tungilik also works in mixed media sculpture with pieces exhibited at the Nunavat Arts Festival, Great Northern Arts Festival, Banff Centre for the Arts and Oceanic Museum of Monaco, among others. His work can be found in public and private collections nationally and internationally, such as in the Cerny Inuit Art Collection in Bern, Switzerland. 0:03:45 HI: Tungilik has served as both a manager of Cultural Industries for the Government of Nunavut and as the Director for the Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association. He currently serves as the chairperson for the Board of Trustees at Nunatta Museum in Iqaluit. And for faculty in the room, Jesse is, next Tuesday at lunch time in the Faculty of Fine Arts, he's going to be giving an additional lecture, not a lecture, just a kind of conversation around working in the North because he has so much experience as an arts administrator as well. And he is also a member of the Inuit governance group of the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership Partnership Grant which is a big grant that I am the Director of here at Concordia University. Jesse recently worked with the Winnipeg Art Gallery and Government of Nunavut to commission new artwork and select collections based work for installation at the Iqaluit airport, and he was one of two Artists in Residence for the 2018 TD North/South Artist Exchange and will be included in the forthcoming inaugural exhibitions of the Winnipeg Art Gallery's Inuit Art Centre opening in 2020. 0:04:46 HI: Just this morning we've... And actually, last week as well, we've started a new project here that Jesse is leading, where he's working with Inuit Sivunitsavut students and other students from Concordia to create a sealskin spacesuit which is a project that's going to be exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. It is a collaborative piece that they are doing through a series of workshops here. Right now there's an artist on the 11th floor, a seamstress who is working on the pattern of the suit that I think Jesse wants to get inside and walk around. 0:05:17 HI: Hope he's going to talk about that a little bit more, but there's actually, next Thursday and Friday there will be a workshop for the students that people are invited to come and drop in and observe that will also be upstairs in Milieux where the group of Inuit students will be actually assembling the pieces that are being cut today or being designed today to start creating the spacesuit. And then on the... I think it's probably gonna be on the afternoon of April 30th at the end of the semester, we're gonna have a little reception. You can come and see the final work. So please join me in welcoming Jesse during his period of exciting residency. [applause] 0:05:57 JT: Well thanks everyone. Those were lovely introductions. Hi everyone. Thank you for coming here to hang out with me this afternoon. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a really informal guy. Those that know me, I'm not super talky. [laughter] 0:06:19 JT: I prefer my art work to speak for me, but today I'll break some of my rules and yeah, we'll have some good conversation. I'm going... Throughout this presentation I'll be going over some of my background, some of my... Some of the art work that I've done, talk about my art practice, about my motivations and how I get ideas, and kind of start going through some of the work that I'm working on, that I've been working on recently as well as some of what I have planned. 0:07:10 JT: So, yeah... I know the aim of the talk is more future-oriented, but if you'll bear with me for the first half, I'm just going to give some background and some history of me and a little bit of Inuit art. So, a good place to start for the introduction of who I am is where I grew up. So, I grew up all over the North. I've never actually lived anywhere more than four years at a time. So, I've spent most of my time in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. I pretty much considered that my hometown, I spent the most time there. But, I've lived in Pangnirtung, which is just north of there. Rankin Inlet on the coast of Hudson's Bay. I lived there for a number of years. I lived in Arctic Bay for four years. 0:08:17 JT: I also lived in Yellowknife. So, my childhood was moving all throughout the North, so that gave me a really broad kind of point of view of the North. I also lived in Southern Canada for a number of years too, about 10 years in total. I went through high school in British Columbia on Vancouver Island and I lived in Ontario for about four years. I actually lived here in Montreal for almost a year when I was a teenager. And I also have lived abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark for a time. So yeah, I've spent my life moving around a lot, and that's really informed a lot of my influences for my art and dealing with people and yeah, so I... 0:09:24 JT: Yeah, in my work, I've taken patterns and designs from certain regions where I've lived. So, going kind of into the past. So, I come from a family of artists, this is my grandfather, Mark Tungilik. He was a very prolific carver. So, he started off in stone carving but really he became very specialized in ultra-miniature ivory carvings. He also did some jewelry as well too, which is kind of, I like kind of comparing our work. He actually saw quite a bit of success as an artist in his lifetime and his work is exhibited all over the world. He has pieces in the National Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery here in Canada. But he also has pieces in Buckingham Palace, and the Vatican Museum. 0:10:46 JT: He actually did an artist residency in Moscow, Russia in 1976 and he actually has some pieces there and it was shown in the Kremlin. So, yeah, my grandfather was one of the... My major artistic influences growing up. He passed away in 1986, when I was just a very young child, so I never really had much direct memory of him. But because his body of work was so prolific, I've encountered his work many times through my life. His wife, my grandmother, was also a carver as well too. She mostly worked in stone carving. And both of them, I mean, they... They lived a very traditional life for the first half of their life. So, really, this traditional way of life for me and my family is very close chronologically. I mean... 0:12:12 JT: My father was born in a skin tent, on the sea ice. And really, it was only during his lifetime that we really started transitioning into the modern-day that we have now. So, this is my grandmother, one of my aunties, and my grandfather there when they were young adults. 0:12:42 JT: So yeah, my grandfather's carvings were very, very traditional. The subject matter was very traditional, he depicted basically, what his life was before colonization, and before they moved into communities. So yeah, he depicted a lot of wildlife, a lot of, like hunting, hunter scenes. These are two from my grandmother. She, yeah, she mostly depicted, again, very traditional subject matter, things from their own life and it was kind of a neat snapshot of what things were like, really not that long ago. And yeah, so he became extremely proficient in miniatures. These figures are only like... The one on the left is only like an inch high. 0:13:54 JT: And yeah, so throughout the progression of his work, some more modern influences started to appear. This piece is a fox trap, that's carved in solid ivory, actually. And the whole piece is only about, I think, like three inches long. It's really incredible actually, just the amount of my minute detail he was able to capture. But yeah, you can see through the progression of his work more and more modern influences were starting to show up in his work and that was really fascinating to me. One of my favorite works from my grandfather, it's called, Carver Cut Himself. [laughter] 0:14:52 JT: I love the... Incorporating the red ribbon for the blood, it's a neat mixed media sculpture. So yeah, growing up my major artistic influences were coming from him, which was very, very traditional, very... He was unilingual, Inuktitut speaker, so I wasn't able to really communicate with him, but yeah, the imagery of the traditional Inuit art always stuck with me and it kind of remained a bit of a constant through my work. But yeah, I'll go into it a bit later. 0:15:54 JT: More recently, a lot of my work has also been inspired by my late father, Marius. Yeah, so my father, like I mentioned, he was born in the traditional way of life, he was born in a skin tent on the sea ice. But when he was five years old he was taken away to go to the Sir Joseph Bernier residential school in Chesterfield Inlet, and he was there, I think, until he was about 14 years old, and during his stay there he endured some really terrible abuse and... So, for the rest of his life, he battled a lot with the... His traumatic childhood experiences. 0:17:03 JT: When I was about seven years old, he actually, he became one of the first Inuits to really... To talk publicly about the abuse that happened while he was at residential school. So most of my childhood was kind of tied to this fight for... My father's fight for justice for... To get Canada to, first, acknowledge that the abuse happened at these schools and how widespread the abuse was. But also working towards creating a class action lawsuit, and to have justice. 0:18:02 JT: Unfortunately, he never received justice. So, this was one of my father's abusers Johannes Revior, he was an Oblate minister. And he was actually charged with the abuse in the late 1990s, but he actually fled the country to France, he was a French citizen. So, he fled to France after his... After the warrant was made for him, and he's been there ever since. He lives in Strasbourg, France. And he's never received any justice for what he's done. And Canada has... The government of Canada has really not made any efforts to return him to Canada to face the justice system, which is... It is one of the... Yeah, the major frustrations, certainly in my father's life, and now in mine. 0:19:28 JT: So, growing up with this terrible trauma that he endured, he spent pretty much his entire life trying to regain his own Inuit identity, and to try to heal himself. But of course, it's a very difficult thing and he struggled all of his life, and he also struggled a lot with alcohol. He was a chronic alcoholic for most of my life. So, this... I've used art as way to process a lot of that childhood trauma, the intergenerational trauma, and also to try to reconcile my childhood memories of my father, and trying to separate that from his trauma. So, a lot of my art, especially in recent years has been focused around trying to figure out, to figure that out, but also, I use art as a way to get... Basically, to get it out of me physically, it's really a difficult thing to live with. So, I've used art as a way to deal with that, and to heal myself. 0:21:21 JT: So, yeah, my... This is me and my sister and my father. So, we... My childhood was, I guess, pretty unique, but in a lot of ways kind of emblematic of what Inuit are today. I had a few tastes of the traditional way of life. When I was a child, we would go out hunting and we would spend the summers camping, and being on the land for weeks at a time. But as I started to grow up it became less and less common that I would do that. And of course, I lived in Southern Canada, and abroad, and... So, I've kind of grown up in both of those worlds, as many Inuit of my generation have. So, a lot of that also is reflected in the work that I have created. Yeah, my father, I mean, yeah, he was... Despite his trauma he was a very funny man, and he always loved joking around and making people laugh. Yeah, so, and a lot of my work has been trying to re-remember that as opposed to later on in his life. 0:23:03 JT: So yeah, so my first foray into the arts, like Heather mentioned was in ceramics at The Matchbox Gallery in Rankin Inlet. Yeah, it was something that... Yeah, I tried it right away and I loved it and I actually had my first public showing of my art, I think I was about 11, of showing my ceramic sculptures. I think it was in a bank lobby in Yellowknife. Yeah, so I started off in ceramics. I really loved the... How dynamic it is. 0:23:53 JT: It's not nearly as restrictive as carving where you have to remove material to really get the shape. It's all about adding and I really took to that. To that freedom very early on and... Throughout my childhood I was always playing with plasticine, creating little figures. Yeah, then I left art for quite a few years, I've worked in a number of different fields, from environmental education to... I've spent a lot of time in government doing policy development, and kind of moving into arts administration and advocacy later on. But yeah, so I... Yeah, when I returned to art it was through jewelry, I was living in Iqaluit and I happened to meet Mathew Nuqingaq at a bar, and yeah, we became friends and he invited me to his studio to play around, and I discovered that I really loved working with these traditional materials. 0:25:38 JT: So, for those that may not be familiar, this is ivory coming from a walrus tusk. This is muskox horn as well here. This is baleen from a bowhead whale, you can see kind of the shape there, and yeah, so there's baleen, muskox horn, and ivory, and some silver. So I became very attracted to jewelry making with him partially because it's... I mean, the pieces are small, they're easy to transport, and really it doesn't take all that much money to get into it, so it was a good way to kind of transition my way back into being an artist again. 0:26:42 JT: So, I worked at Matthew's studio for a while. Like has been mentioned, my specialty was in baleen, muskox horn, and ivory, and also silver. This is the baleen there, and that's arctic tern. So I made jewelry for quite a while before I actually went back to the government as manager for cultural industries. So, what I liked about creating jewelry out of these materials is you're able to incorporate a lot of the traditional ways of creating, of carving, but in these kind of contemporary ways, so that really interested me for quite a long time. And I made a living as a jeweler for a few years. 0:28:06 JT: But as much as I love the aesthetics of working with these materials, and the feeling of being kind of continuing on the traditional way of arts, I started to kind of get bored a little bit, I kind of wanted to challenge myself a bit more and try more things, so I started experimenting a bit more with my work. This is a pair of sunglasses that I made out of baleen as an experiment. One really great thing about baleen is... It's one of my favorite materials to work with despite how much it smells when you work it, but the baleen of course is the filters inside the mouths of the bowhead... Well, we get it from bowhead whales, but any filter feeding whale has them, but... 0:29:14 JT: So, they're these long strips, they're almost like a hard plastic, they're really lightweight, but it has a lot of structural integrity. But the thing I find the most neat about it is when you apply heat to the baleen, you can actually mold it into different shapes. It's really fantastic to work with and it polishes up very beautifully. So, I did a lot of work with that. 0:29:50 JT: Like I said, I always love trying new ways of art. I mean, like in the traditional Inuit art forms that are really, I guess, made popular these days, I mean, this carving is wahing, as you see here, this was one of my first and only forays into textile work and embroidery. So I've always been very interested in just trying whatever I can. This is some charcoal work that I did, these are two of my aunties, actually, from an archival photo. 0:30:44 JT: I did a mural commission a few years ago. This is in the Dehalut Library. This is a... It depicts a traditional Inuit legend which is told in many different iterations from Alaska all the way... Or, from Siberia all the way to Greenland, which was something that I found very interesting. There are regional variations on this story, but it's... Yeah, I found it very fascinating that the same basic story is told throughout the Inuit, the different Inuit groups over a period of thousands of years. So, this was one of my, I guess, experiments in the more traditional Inuit imagery and, yeah. But I'm a lot more comfortable in 3D. 0:32:01 JT: So I started moving more into carving, but I wanted... When I decided to pursue becoming an artist as a profession, I told myself that if I was going to do this, I wanted to make things that other people aren't making, and there were a lot of ideas that I thought that nobody else had really attempted before so that kind of really drew me into pursuing it and trying out all these different experimental techniques. So this is a... This is a bit better of a photo. 0:32:52 JT: So I called this piece Manhole Hunter, and so basically it's a traditional Inuit hunter and caribou antler there on a concrete base. He's seal hunting, but it's over a manhole cover, obviously. And basically, what I wanted... This piece was actually inspired by a spoken word poem that... By Mosha Fulger, originally from Iqaluit but living in Ottawa for the past several years. But basically, to paraphrase, he said that whenever he saw a homeless Inuit on the street he imagined that they were cast adrift on concrete ice slabs, and that really resonated with me. I never liked seeing homeless Inuit, and having spent a number of years living in the South, I wanted something to kind of reflect that, but also, it also has kind of a... The themes touch on climate change as well as, social change as well too. So I kind of like playing around with that kind of imagery. 0:34:29 JT: A fun fact. You notice that this first picture is a lot brighter than the second one. It actually... This carving actually survived a house fire [laughter] and I wasn't able to completely clean the soot off the concrete, but I ended up liking the color so I kind of incorporated it into that. But yeah, so this piece was shown at the Royal Oceanographic Museum in Monaco a few years ago, and they used my photo for the banner there and yeah, no, it was pretty neat. The prince... What's his name? Prince of Monaco. [laughter] 0:35:32 S?: Prince Albert. 0:35:33 JT: Prince Albert, yeah, there you go. That dude. Yeah, he opened the exhibition there, so it was pretty neat to see my work in such a fancy setting. I kind of... Yeah. So I started to get really more into, to more contemporary themes and exploring different contemporary material, and on the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement, I made this piece which I entitled The Nunavice Flag, and funnily enough, actually, the 20th anniversary of the creation of Nunavut was yesterday, actually. 0:36:32 JT: So yeah, no, this piece, obviously it's a deconstruction of the Nunavut flag and I replaced all the colors and imagery with addictive substances. So the used bingo cards there on the left, and the cigarette packs, and the beer cans and yeah, no, I mean, like it was... When I came up with the concept of this piece I was feeling pretty disillusioned with the government of Nunavut and how little change that I observed that the creation of the government of Nunavut brought, and I kind of wanted to make a commentary on the colonial influences on the land. 0:37:45 JT: All these addictive vices were brought up with settlement and, unfortunately, a lot of Inuit fall victim to these vices. So I wanted to explore that but also to get people to think about the various stereotypes people associate with certain regions. Having grown up, having gone through high school in the South, yeah, I heard all the stereotypes of Inuit that they are addicts and they're... Whatnot. So I wanted to use this kind of as an illustration to get people to think about that and also to kind of turn the symbolism of the original flag kind of on its head. 0:38:58 JT: So another fun fact, my first paying job as a teenager, it was actually as a legislative page on April 1st, 1999. So, I was... I had a front row seat to the creation of the government in Nunavut and I actually saw the flag before it was released to the public and I hated it immediately. [chuckle] 0:39:32 JT: I thought it was the ugliest thing in the world and yeah, I never really warmed up to it fully. [chuckle] 0:39:46 JT: Yeah, it's less so now. But see, I basically, I mean, the symbolism of the colors of the flag, in the original flag, the gold, the yellow is supposed to represent the gold, the rich resources of our territory, which of course is the only thing that Canada is interested in. But yeah, the red of the inuksuk there, which also looks like a cross which I didn't like. But it's the same red as the flag of Canada to symbolize the Canada's dominion over the land and to assert Canadian sovereignty. 0:40:35 JT: The white is supposed to represent the pristine, our pristine nature which is being exploited every day. And the blue of the star is supposed to represent the North Star, our guiding light, but also as a metaphor for our elders who are supposed to be guiding the development of Nunavut. So yeah, like I said, I spent quite a bit of my young adulthood in the government, in civil service. I started with the Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth when I was about 19. 0:41:37 JT: So, I spent a lot of time in government trying to basically build the framework of policy, legislation and guidelines and make them relevant to Nunavut. I mean, basically all the policies and guidelines and the legislation that the government in Nunavut was based on was borrowed from the Government of Northwest Territories. 0:42:13 JT: So basically, yeah, I spent a lot of years developing that legislative framework, making it more relevant to Nunavut. But unfortunately, my observations throughout that process really disappointed me in a lot of ways. In my opinion, a lot of the attempts to Nunavutize the legislation was really superficial and really not much was changed, other than the facade. And yeah, unfortunately, the government still is in the same predicament. So these were all contributing to my thought process, creating this piece. I like the... Like I mentioned, I created, I put this... I constructed it on Nunavut Day, which is July 7, on the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement. 0:43:34 JT: And I did this just down the street from the unveiling of this wonderful granite monument, that's about 10, I don't even know, it's humongous, as a way to celebrate the occasion of the signing of the land claim agreement, unveiled with a bunch of pomp and circumstance and it was really a big celebration of how far we got. My celebration was a lot more cynical, and got less attention which is fine. [chuckle] 0:44:22 JT: So yeah, this was my real first kind of dipping my toes into really contemporary, contemporary inspired art. There are still Inuit imagery in there, of course, I've turned it on its head, but, yeah. So yeah. 0:44:52 JT: And then I created a companion piece to it, a little bit more light-hearted, this piece I called Pop, Chip, Kukuk, which kukuk is Inuit slang for chocolate bar. And this was... This piece was a little bit more difficult for non-Inuit to really connect with because in the North, these are basically the Inuit food groups of today. [laughter] 0:45:35 JT: Yeah, they're, of course, brought from the south, and these foods are a lot cheaper too to buy for Northerners, than healthy foods. So yeah, so I wanted to get people to think a bit about that, about food insecurity for... Which is still a major problem faced by people in Nunavut even though the government has had 20 years to try to figure it out. 0:46:14 JT: So yeah, a little bit more light-hearted than its companion, but it still has that thematic connection with the North. So this piece was one of my more, I guess going back to more traditional imagery, and subject matter, and materials, this is a piece that I entitled The Spirit of Intergenerational Trauma. And this basically is one of the pieces that is most closely related to to my father and, my attempts to reconcile my relationship with him, and trying to unpack the intergenerational trauma that I inherited from him. 0:47:32 JT: So this piece is also a, kind of a showcase of using many, many different types of traditional materials that Inuit have carved. So on that, I mean it's incorporating of course, ivory, baleen and then muskox horn. There's some caribou antler in there too, the vertebrae is from a seal, the torso is made out of caribou skulls, and the head of the creature is actually a piece of petrified coral that that I found outside of Iqaluit. 0:48:29 JT: So, there's a bunch of symbolism in this piece. This is a focus of the figure that's fused to the back of this Spirit of Intergenerational Trauma. So, this is a inverted caribou skull, but when I was putting it together, and adding the muskox horn nose, it looked to me like... For those that are familiar with Inuit art there's a lot of carvings that depict transformations of people. So to me this looked like a shaman that's transforming into an owl. 0:49:23 JT: So, I kind of incorporated that, and a lot of my symptoms of PTSD were incorporated into this piece. So basically, the piece as a whole is kind of supposed to be a physical manifestation of the terrible nightmares that I had, following my father's death, of the flashbacks and the trauma associated with him. I had struggled through for many years with terrible, terrible nightmares, so I wanted this piece to be a physical manifestation of my feelings dealing with my father and his death. So, I imagined this creature, this insect-like creature dragging its dry bones behind me wherever I went. 0:50:34 JT: And just as kind of a constant reminder of the loss of my father, and the difficult life that he struggled with. So, the figure itself is kind of representative of my father. But to illustrate the intergenerational trauma impacts, the spirit itself is haunted by a spirit of trauma of its own, represented by the fused head on its back. And you may notice that the expression, of the face is very similar to the photo of my father when I was a child, which was one of my favorite memories of my father growing up, which... 0:51:53 JT: You know when my father died, I discovered his body and I had a lot of trauma from that and for a long time, I wasn't able to remember my father's living face and that really bothered me and affected me for a long time. So, I've spent years in therapy basically trying to rebuild my memories of him to replace the traumatic ones, that have kind of taken its place. This piece was very much about my journey to try to heal from that traumatic wound. 0:53:04 JT: Last summer, I was fortunate enough to take part in an artist residency at the Banff Center, I was like Heather mentioned I was one of two artists that participated in the North-South Artist Residency Exchange. I came from Iqaluit to work at the Banff Center and another Inuvialuk who was living in Calgary went to the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik to work. So, during my residency at the Banff Centre, this piece here, which I've kind of gone back and forth with titles, I haven't quite settled on one. I've been kind of calling it Bottled but I'm not really that satisfied with it. But basically, I mean the idea there, it's an Inuvit figure cast in bronze that's suspended in clear polyester resin inside of a bottle. 0:54:27 JT: And yeah, so this project was a lot of fun to figure out and to basically my... What I wanted to get out of the Banff residency was to really push my limits as an artist to try new techniques using a new technology and really bring the traditional Inuit imagery into a contemporary context and really using modern-day ways of creating. So, with this piece, I created the maquette out of plasticine and had it... I 3D scanned it, and had it printed in wax and in plastic and out of the wax figure, I had it cast in bronze which was a lot of fun for me. It's something that I've always wanted to try. 0:55:41 JT: But basically, my idea for this piece was to have a series of these figures in the bottle using different materials. Again, I wanted to show the intergenerational relationship with addiction, with trauma. So, I did that by incorporating different materials. So, the bronze of course is a very ancient material. People have been using it in art for thousands of years. So, I used that to illustrate the older generations. Yeah, so it was pretty fun employing my jewellery making skills to work on this bronze figure. And like I said, I also made copies of the figure in 3D printed plastic, the plastic is of course a very contemporary material to illustrate the new and current generation. 0:57:06 JT: Yeah, there was a lot of figuring out with this project, there were several different techniques and materials which I had no experience with that I had to figure out how to work around. So that was a really fun challenge for me. I had never done any 3D scanning or printing before, I had never worked in bronze, I had never worked with resin, or cutting bottles or anything. So, it really... 0:57:53 JT: I had to figure this project out from the ground up, which was something that really interested me. Yeah, I had a number of problems with this project. It never really went entirely my way. So, this is kind of a representation of what I wanted the plastic figure to look like. But of course, I wanted it to be suspended in some sort of clear material. I did try with the polyester resin but unfortunately the problem that I ran into with that, with the plastic figure is the... When it's curing, the polyester resin heats up quite a bit, so every time I tried with the polyester resin it just ended up melting the plastic figure. So, that yeah, I still have to figure out how I'll do that. I might try with a like silicon-based materials, I don't know, I'm still trying to figure that out. 0:59:19 JT: So, with the bronze casted figure, so the original idea was that it would be completely submerged in the clear resin to give the impression that the figure is drowning in the bottle. Unfortunately, the resin didn't want to cooperate with me, and yeah, what I discovered through the process was that not only does the polyester resin heat up quite a bit, it also shrinks a little bit when it cures which was problematic to me. It also leaked out quite a bit in the bottom during curing so I lost... So the water level ended up being a lot lower than I was planning. But I mean I ended up kind of liking that because the refraction within the polyester resin ended up being a lot more dramatic than I was expecting, so I kind of liked having the non-distorted features visible through the glass 'cause the face and the hands are actually quite detailed, so I didn't want to do all that work for nothing. So, I ended up with a bottle half full, half empty, that is kind of... [laughter] 1:01:06 JT: A philosophical discussion. Yeah, so that was a lot of fun to me. It didn't turn out quite as I hoped, or imagined but that seems to be a pretty constant thing in my work these days. [laughter] 1:01:30 JT: Yeah, so yeah, I mean, it's just one of the... One of the realities that you have to go through as an artist. I have all these ideas but sometimes my hands, just... They just don't do it justice. So yeah, many of... I've found with a lot of my artistic projects, especially the more complex ones, one of the... The biggest and most difficult steps for me to start, is to make peace with the fact that it won't turn out how I picture it in my head. 1:02:17 JT: Yeah, which is sometimes a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Yeah, so at the Banff residency, I wanted to do one project that I had never tried before, and that I wanted to to really experiment with, and play around with, but I also wanted to spend some of my time there at the residency, going over something that I'm a bit more comfortable with, and kind of a call back to my early artistic roots. 1:03:04 JT: So I did this ceramic project, which is a vase actually, and I called this piece, The Mind-Blowing Inspiration. So, I had a lot of fun playing around with the different facial expressions. Yeah, I tend to get a lot of enjoyment playing around with that, so... Originally, this was supposed to be a Raku pottery project, but I was in Banff during the height of summer and there were a lot of forest fires that year, so... Yeah, we ended up not being able to do the Raku firing. So I ended up kind of trying to capture the same kind of feeling of Raku. I wanted the textures to really come out, so I ended up with this kind of dirty glazed type thing, which was, I thought turned out pretty well. 1:04:30 JT: Yeah, so I feel very comfortable working in clay, and although as an adult, I haven't really done much with it. I don't know, maybe it's... I associate it a lot with my childhood, and so it kind of feels kind of like a childish thing to do for me, even though I know that... Yeah, it's... Yeah, I don't know, it's just kind of a psychological thing for me. 1:05:06 JT: So yeah, this project was kind of going back to childhood. So yeah, more recently... So, this was a piece, mixed-media sculpture that I did here and I entitled it, the... Feeding My Family. And this was done for Nuit Blanche who was part of a collaboration of a larger group of mostly Northern Inuit artists, part of a installation called Memory Keepers One. And basically... So, the figure, of course, is an Inuit hunter butchering a seal but both the figure and the seal are covered in Northern and NorthMart receipts that I've collected over a period of about five years when I was living in Pangnirtung in Iqaluit. And you can't really see it in here but the intention was for people to be able to go up and read these receipts to see how much it costs you to feed your family in the north which, of course, is a lot. The cost of living in the north is really astronomical. 1:07:02 JT: So, there's a lot of symbolism incorporated into this piece that I wanted to convey. The traditional imagery of the Inuit hunter and the seal juxtaposed with the imagery of the receipts is kind of showing the dramatic social changes that we've been forced into in the past several decades. Inuit, of course, we're a subsistence hunting culture before we were colonized and assimilated. So, I wanted to show that the cultural changes, also the disconnection between the Inuit and their traditional food source, which is the seal, for the most part, by removing the hunter's hands. So yeah, I mean, seal hunting now is still an important part of contemporary Inuit life, but it's more relegated to a leisure pursuit rather than an actual way of life these days which means that it costs quite a bit of money to be a hunter. So, I wanted to show that. 1:09:00 JT: I also wanted to illustrate the loss of cultural identity of Inuit by creating the figure without any facial features and I also wanted to get an impression of that the figures are stuck in place by these receipts as a way to... Inside the tent structure as a way to explore the idea that Inuit have been forcibly relocated into government-administered communities. Inuit, of course, were semi-nomadic before colonization but we were forced into these communities to live in a way of life that was not really compatible with how we have lived our lives for thousands of years. 1:10:36 JT: So, I wanted to really show that in a way that the people could pick up on. I think one of my more favorite aspects of conceptual art is that depending on who's viewing it there can be pretty radical differences in what people take away from these pieces. For Northerners, they'll probably take away different things from people that may not be that familiar with the imagery and traditions of the north so, some more photos of the piece was installed here during Nuit Blanche but more, say, closer view so you can see the... 1:11:43 JT: There are seats there. Yeah, so what... Yeah, one of the main, my main, I guess motivations to make conceptual art is kind of just a... It's a way that I've been trying to communicate a lot of the social problems that are faced by Inuit. I've found that, throughout my life I've been trying to find ways of how to bring attention to that. I tried a lot when I was younger to do that directly through government action, through policies and legislation, trying to make a difference in my home. But like I mentioned before, I became quite disillusioned with that process. Unfortunately, in the government of Nunavut, most of the actual decision makers are more often than not non-Inuit. So most of the policy, the policy advisors and policy directors and deputy ministers unfortunately, are not Inuit. So a lot of the work that I've been trying to work towards both in my artistic practice as well as an arts administrator and advocate is really to try to address that deficit of Inuit decision makers and influencers. 1:13:42 JT: So I try to communicate that through my art, but also through direct action and through advocacy. So like Heather mentioned, I've worked as an arts administrator for a number of years. I was an arts manager for the territory for a few years. I was executive director of the Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association. So one thing that I've been really, really passionate about is making sure that Inuit are... Get to have access to positions of influence and to be able to speak for ourselves, basically. I think many of the problems that are faced by Inuit today really originate from the lack of direct representation of us in these public spheres and these organizations and institutions that really have so much of an impact on our day-to-day lives. I think a lot of that could be solved by having Inuit decide what's best for Inuit. So I've tried in my, both as my career as a visual artist, but as an arts advocate to try to move towards that and I've gotten various levels of success with that. But I think that there are a lot of ways that that can be done through conceptual art. 1:15:54 JT: One of the the major, I guess frustrations that I've encountered as a young Inuit person trying to communicate what life in Canada is for Inuit today is really, I mean, when you try to speak about it plainly, I've found any time you start talking about anything negative, especially the legacy with the abuses that happened at residential school, a lot of people feel very overwhelmed by that, and often they... I've seen that a lot of people just shut down and don't really absorb what I'm trying to tell them, just because... Most non-indigenous Canadians really, I mean, they seem to have a serious problem with acknowledging at a very basic level that Canada has colonized us. And they've spent a lot of time and resources trying to assimilate us culturally by removing any visages of our traditional culture, of our language, of our practices. And it's really frustrating for me. It kind of feels like, it's like this gaslighting at a societal scale, people just really don't seem to want to acknowledge what has happened to the Inuit by the nation of Canada. 1:18:04 JT: So, my focus on conceptual art has been, kind of, a way to try to get around that experience that I've had with people just zoning out with just not wanting to hear what we're telling them. So, I kind of see it as a way to bypass people's biases and preconceived notions. That's really what I've been very much interested in, and what I've been trying to develop and try to focus. 1:18:56 JT: Yeah, so, like Heather mentioned... Yeah, the big piece that I'm concentrating, here at Concordia, is this project of the sealskin spacesuit. So this... Yeah, I'm really excited about this project. It's a lot more light-hearted than a lot of my other work, so it doesn't have the same amount of emotional... Yeah, emotional labor that went into my other pieces. We actually just started making the pattern today, this morning, and I'm super excited. We've ordered the seal skins, we're starting to nail down the design, the pattern and design, for the piece. So I wanted to really design the spacesuit in a way that incorporates a lot of the traditional Inuit design patterns, but also to... Yeah, I mean, to look futuristic and to look like a spacesuit. Yeah, so, I'm pretty excited about that. 1:20:31 JT: So, for the patches, like the flag and the logo and the name tag, I'm having all beaded, and of course, I'm replacing the Canadian flag with the flag of Nunavut, 'cause that's where I'm from. And yeah, so, again, this is all very, very new for me, like my project at the Banff Center, I have almost no experience with any of this. My mother, when I was growing up, even though she's actually a settler from this area, she's from the Laurentians, she ended up becoming very proficient as a... In Inuit clothing. She's a very great seamstress. 1:21:39 JT: And so, she made all of my traditional clothing growing up, and so that was kind of my inspiration for this piece. I always imagined when I was wearing the... It was mostly Caribou clothing that I wore because we were from... It's when we lived in Rankin Inlet, which is more the Caribou hunting people rather than the seal hunting people. But they're very bulky, they're very heavy, and I always imagined when I was wearing them that I was wearing a spacesuit. I had a very active imagination when I was a kid, and I would always play around with it, and it kind of stuck with me, growing up. So, when I heard about this residency here at Concordia, and that it had a future-oriented theme to it, this project came to mind. So, yeah, I've been very, very excited about this, and, yeah, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah, so that's about it. [laughter] [applause] 1:23:17 JT: So, I think we have some time for questions and discussion for a little bit, if you guys have any? Yeah? 1:23:28 S?: Oh I just... Today I saw on the news that NASA uses parts of Nunavut to train people to be in space. 1:23:37 JT: That's right, yeah. They've been... They actually have, every summer for the past, I don't know, at least well over a decade, they have been training on Devon Island, which is one of the far north islands in Inuit. Yeah, so, NASA... There have been... Yeah, there's quite a few astronauts in training that have spent time there, so it's, yeah, kind of... 1:24:13 S?: On the spacesuit, you mentioned [1:24:16] ____. Would you use your version, your interpretation? [laughter] 1:24:25 JT: Well, I don't know, I... [laughter] 1:24:30 JT: I think the beaded version is enough of a kind of adaptation. I think thematically that'll work best. Any other questions? 1:24:56 S?: Okay, thank you so much. I was just wondering about the structure that your sculpture was in, did you build that as well or... [overlapping conversation] 1:25:08 JT: No, actually, yeah, that piece was a collaborative project. So actually Jason Sikoak here at Concordia made the tent structure for me, which was pretty fantastic actually, it turned out great. 1:25:29 S?: In that picture of you, your sister and your father, did your mom make those outfits? 1:25:32 JT: She did, yes. 1:25:33 S?: They look brand new. [laughter] 1:25:37 JT: They were very well used. The traditional Inuit clothing is actually really, really fantastic. They're very resilient and yeah, you can put them through pretty much anything. They look great. Yes. 1:25:56 S?: Why is it so expensive to hunt? 1:26:00 JT: Well, basically, everything is expensive in the north. So there are no roads or trains or anything connecting Nunavut with the rest of Canada or anywhere else, really. So all of our goods have to be either flown in or shipped in during a short period in the summer time. So that basically doubles or triples the price of pretty much everything that we get. Yeah, so that's why everything is so expensive. 1:26:33 S?: Gasoline, bullets. 1:26:37 JT: Yeah, no it's really a cruel irony that hunting has become so expensive in the north. It was such an integral part of our life for thousands of years and now people can't afford to do it. So it's pretty indicative actually of our relationship with the rest of Canada. It kind of destroyed everything. 1:27:10 Sara England: Hey, I have a question about your process. You frame your work around conceptual art, but you're so interested in the material aspect of it too and I was just wondering if you, if when you're thinking about making new work if it starts with the materials, and what they offer you or if you listen more to the concept and then how materials can feed into that? And then I guess the second part is... If through this residency, weÕre thinking about a futurist framework and if you find that that's a new level that you're considering in your practice or if you've always sort of found that? 1:27:49 JT: Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah, thanks for reminding me, actually I meant to speak about that during the presentation. Yeah, I put a lot of thought into the materials that I incorporate into the work, and I don't know, I guess it's about half and half that sometimes the work kind of comes from the material that I want to explore or... Yeah, I love incorporating found objects into my work. I think that thematically, I really like how that works. I see it as kind of an extension of the traditional way of making art, the way that Inuit created our traditionally was taking from our physical surroundings and using what we had available. 1:28:57 JT: So I see using especially like the found objects that are basically ubiquitous in our communities today and using it in a way that kind of subverts the traditional imagery, but... And I like the contrast that it makes thematically, I like the way that... Yeah, basically using everyday objects in a way to make people think differently about their relationship to the objects, that's something that's very, very interesting to me. 1:29:51 JT: Also, another thing that's really been interesting to me kind of thematically with my work is playing around with different scales. So this, the Feeding My Family piece was one of my more larger scale, sculptures, and it's something that I've been particularly interested in recently, especially since my grandfather, who I mentioned that I was very inspired by early in my career, worked primarily in the ultraminiature. So I like the, I guess, thematic contrast of me going into opposite direction and working in large scale, so that's... Yeah, definitely things that I'm very interested in developing. 1:30:54 S?: What is the response to your community? 1:30:57 JT: It's been a pretty mixed bag, like when I unveiled The Nunavice Flag, I was expecting some negative reactions, and I got some. [laughter] 1:31:15 JT: Yeah, yeah, there were a few comments from local people that I knew complaining that it was very negative, which I mean, it is. [laughter] 1:31:33 JT: They were kind of upset that I was portraying that part of life in the north because when you look at a lot of the Inuit art that has been commercially sold for the past several decades, it's all portraying the happy-go-lucky Eskimo trope that has really permeated the public sphere. So yeah, I kind of go out of my way to make sure to show the other side and, yeah, no, I mean I do get a few comments that, yeah, I'm focusing too much on the negative but I do think that it's important to portray that as well. 1:32:22 S?: As a follow up do you think they would respond differently if they knew that these works were being created for in community only? 1:32:33 S?: Is that true? [laughter] 1:32:35 JT: I don't know. I don't know. Life in the north, it's very strange because you get the Inuit, non-Inuit dynamics. But I mean all of our communities are very small and very isolated. You get the same small town problems that you get everywhere else and there can be a lot of jealousy and stuff like that. So yeah, that happens everywhere. But, yeah, by and large, the reactions of people back home have been very positive. They do seem to appreciate what I'm doing but, of course, it's not gonna be everyone, but... 1:33:35 S?: And actually, I wanna return to Sara's, the second part of her question about the future framing and whether that's sort of been... Whether that's something that's already in your mind or it's been productive in this frame to think about those things. 1:33:47 JT: Yeah, no, it definitely has... And throughout my artistic career, yeah, I've been moving towards a much more futuristic kind of theme, I guess or... And I'm trying to incorporate a lot more modern techniques of working material, of working in as many different contemporary materials as I can and kind of trying to push limits of what people consider Inuit art to be. That's something that I'm very, very interested in as an artist. 1:34:43 S?: What about spirituality and mythology? 1:34:54 JT: Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. I haven't really incorporated that much of that aspect of Inuit culture into my work. I guess the closest one would be The Spirit of Intergenerational Trauma, which... There is a tradition of basically creating spirit monsters in Inuit art. So I guess, yeah, that's the closest I've come to incorporating that into my work. Yeah, I should have mentioned, yeah. 1:35:34 JT: So my grandfather, he was a deeply religious man. He was converted to Christianity and was very, very devout. My father, of course, went through the religious residential school so, he was raised in the Christian tradition although, as an adult, he rejected a lot of that, although he did go back to it afterwards which, yeah, I found difficult to reconcile as well, too. But, by and large, a lot of the stories and the traditions of our traditional spirituality have been lost. Yeah the Christianity really did a number on that. 1:36:37 S?: There was also some mention of legends [1:36:44] ____. 1:36:44 JT: Yeah, yeah and actually, the legend of Kiviuq that I adapted for the mural... Actually, the story is kind of hilarious, just how much subject matter in that is really not Christian. [laughter] 1:37:16 JT: But... Yeah. There is... In the story, there's a spirit of the lake, which is basically just a gigantic water penis. [laughter] 1:37:30 JT: Yeah, there's parts in the story where a man marries a fox and then marries a goose. And it's... And like there's... Like jealousy in there and murdering of... Yeah. [laughter] So yeah, a lot of our traditional Inuit stories and legends were like that. They were very... They were very graphic, so, and there has been kind a resurgence of that coming... Some of it coming back in recent years, but it's still kind of a taboo subject, unfortunately. 1:38:23 S?: When we were talking about the spacesuit, you had mentioned shamanic figures that go off to the moon and so on, and we started this conversation, you were saying that some of the [1:38:33] ____? 1:38:39 JT: That's right, yeah, so I mean like, yeah one of the legends and I guess stories that traditionally have been told, were that our shamans would travel to the moon. Well I mean they would travel all over the place, but, there were also stories traveling to the moon. And yeah, early on, when I was thinking about the design of the seal skin spacesuit, I was playing around with the idea of incorporating some shamanic imagery in the design. But, yeah, that can be a very touchy subject, because a lot of these designs were passed down through families. So yeah, I didn't really want to get into that aspect of kind of pinpointing where certain designs came from so I went more, a little bit more generic, I guess. 1:39:57 JL: Okay, I'm gonna cut it off. [laughter] Jesse's been up there for an hour now. So, thank you, that was a really great presentation. It was wonderful to see. [applause] 1:40:05 JT: My pleasure. 1:40:07 JL: And just quickly, I had one job I didn't do which was to say thank you to the people who helped make this possible which is the Dean, the Dean's Office, Faculty of Fine Arts, Ron in particular. And social sciences Humanities and Research Council and, Victor Arroyo who is helping organize the residency and then Sara England, who's our research coordinator who really put this all together. So, thank you to all of you. [applause] 1:40:45 JL: And to go out on, so next... I keep getting it wrong. 1:40:45 SE: Wednesday. 1:40:47 JL: Next Wednesday afternoon from 2:00 to 6:00, there's gonna be Remembering Tomorrow: Archiving Indigenous Digital Art, it's gonna be a symposium here... Here I think we're up on the 11th floor and we're gonna have three key note speakers, Sherry Farrell Racette... 1:41:04 SE: Camille Callison and Dragan Espenschied. 1:41:06 JL: Yeah, so we invite you all to come join us upstairs on the 11th floor. Two o'clock, next Wednesday. Okay, thank you all. [applause] [pause] Thank You for choosing Scribie.com Cross-check this transcript against the audio quickly and efficiently using our online Integrated Editor. Please visit the following link and click the Check & Download button to start. https://scribie.com/files/857ae5c92f9f4b158574f09745be6093ba50a2b9 Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents: Jesse Tungilik 05/06/19 Page 20 of 20