White Raven

Description

Artist BiographyKavavaow Mannomee was born in 1958 in Brandon, Manitoba, where his mother was being hospitalized for tuberculosis. He rejoined other members of his family in the Baffin Island community of Cape Dorset when he was seven or eight. In the early 1980s, he began working as a printmaker for the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, learning to translate skillfully the drawings of the community’s elder artists into elegant prints. He started making his own drawings while he was still in his teens. Part of a new generation of contemporary Cape Dorset artists who are reshaping the community’s expressive traditions, Mannomee continues to work both as a printmaker and, at home, on his drawing.As the critic Lloyd Dykk has noted, Mannomee’s ink and coloured pencil drawings do not so much represent an Inuit way of life as “document the contours of an idiosyncratic mind.” In a style that is spare and precise, Manomee’s delicately coloured images address themes ranging from man’s relationship to nature to the negative effects of alcohol dependence. He often plays with scale, as in a series of works inspired by Inuit legends of a small race of people, featuring diminutive human forms struggling under the weight of giant objects such as harpoons and traditional utensils. Although the majority of Mannomee’s images include human subjects, some focus solely on the natural world. As a wildlife artist, Mannomee is best known for his highly accomplished images showing birds engaged, like their human counterparts, in various kinds of work. His selective attention to detail gives these drawings a shifting, even surreal quality.