Drawing Inuit Satiric Resilience: Alootook Ipellie’s Decolonial Comics

We see it in the playful irony of Pootoogook’s Watching Seal Hunting on Television (2002 – 03), in which her trademark confessional sketch style juxtaposes the romanticized television image of the Inuit hunter with the everyday banality of life in her community. Best known for large-scale pencil drawings of wildlife rendered in photo-realistic detail, Pitsiulak also created images such as Ice Dance (2012), in which the typically romanticized animals of the North engage in an impromptu breakdancing party. Throughout Toonoo’s career, he satirized expectations of Inuit art by creating pointedly unidealized images such as Shitty Summer (2011), in which the entire tundra landscape is covered with repeating expletives, scrawled crudely and frenetically in oil stick.