Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk

Double vision most often implies an unwanted condition in which the eye records the same image twice. When applied as the title of the Textile Museum and Toronto Biennial of Art’s exhibition of works by Jessie Oonark and her daughters Janet Kigusiuq and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, the term opens toward doubling as a means of tracing interconnections among worlds, geographies, genealogies, people, and animals. Doubling is evoked throughout the exhibition less as a device of mirroring and more as a strategy for registering relations.

Curated by Candice Hopkins, Double Vision brings together a selection of nivinngajuliaat (wall hangings), produced in the 1960s in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) through a government-sponsored craft program, as well as drawings and collages. Made by seamstresses in the community, the tapestries incorporate graphic appliquéd images, often enhanced with embroidery, representing abundant ecologies of entwined humans and other animals. The composition of these distinct worlds doubles as an invitation into the matriarchies that created them. Women artists in Qamani’tuaq “mentored one another in producing unique aesthetic and conceptual lineages,” the exhibition’s website notes, and these bonds and intergenerational teachings register across the exhibition as a whole.