Shuvinai Ashoona’s acclaimed solo exhibition Mapping Worlds is on the road! The show, which saw its first iteration at the Power Plant Contemporary Gallery in Toronto, is currently on view at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. The best of Shuvinai’s oeuvre is on display: fantastical monsters, portraits of people from her community, imagery from popular culture entangled with that of Inuit life, and even a few monochrome landscape drawings depicting Kinngait (Cape Dorset) from an aerial perspective.
While Shuvinai is no stranger to headlining solo exhibitions—the artist has ten under her belt to date—Mapping Worlds has perhaps been her grandest. With the help of numerous lenders from private, public, and corporate collections, the exhibition pieces together a comprehensive works in the exhibition piece together a comprehensive survey of Shuvinai’s drawings made over the past two decades.
The start of 2019 proved to be a big year for Shuvinai, who had two concurrent solo exhibitions in Toronto. In addition to Mapping Worlds, Feheley Fine Arts held the exhibition We End Up Dreaming which featured Shuvinai’s recent coloured pencil and ink drawings, both small and large scale, which drew from images from popular culture and her otherworldly imagination. That winter, it was also announced that Shuvinai had won the coveted 2018 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, a $50,000 bi-annual award presented to significant Canadian artists on the verge of creating a significant body of work. Shuvinai made history as the first Inuit artist to receive the prize.
In May, Pat led a tour of Mapping Worlds at The Power Plant for their weekly speaker series “Sunday Scene.”