Shuvinai Ashoona is an Inuk artist who works primarily in drawing.
15 Facts About Shuvinai Ashoona
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Shuvinai Ashoona is known for her detailed pen and pencil drawings depicting northern landscapes and contemporary Inuit life.
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Shuvinai Ashoona's father Kiugak Ashoona was a sculptor, her mother Sorosilooto Ashoona was a graphic-artist and her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona was one of the most acclaimed Inuit artists of her generation.
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Shuvinai Ashoona is related to artists Napachie Pootoogook, her aunt, and Annie Pootoogook, her cousin, with whom she was selected to participate in the 2012 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Oh, Canada a showcase of contemporary Canadian artists curated by Denise Markonish and held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Shuvinai Ashoona attended high school in Iqaluit, but soon returned to the Kinngait region with her daughter, living with her family at outposts like Luna Bay and Kangiqsualujjuaq.
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The Ashoona family returned to Kingait in the late 1980s, and Shuvinai began visiting Kinngait Studios.
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Shuvinai Ashoona's drawings are sometimes rooted in nature, but other times drawn from imagination, creating a claustrophobic, dense effect on paper.
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Shuvinai Ashoona's monochromes are densely rendered, stunningly intricate compositions in ink and black fineliner.
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Shuvinai Ashoona began using colour in her drawings in the early 2000s, portraying human figures, their shelters, and tools within graphic, imposing topographies, like in the work Composition in the Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
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Shuvinai Ashoona's collaborative work, Earth and Sky is a gigantic banner that debuted at Art Basel in 2009 in an installation complex called Stadthimmel.
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Boyle and Shuvinai Ashoona went on to collaborate on the 2015 travelling exhibition Universal Cobra, building collaborative fantasy worlds, sharing space on the paper.
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In roughly 2009 Ashoona began working with a motif of worlds, drawing human, animal, and hybrid figures interacting with blue and green planets within fantastical settings, as exhibited in Shuvinai's World at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto, September 2012.
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Shuvinai Ashoona has exhibited frequently with Feheley Fine Arts and Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver.
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Shuvinai Ashoona is the subject of a short documentary film titled Ghost Noise, directed by Marcia Connolly and had the song "Midnight Sun" dedicated to her by musician Kevin Hearn, who she painted a guitar for.
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In 2018, Shuvinai Ashoona was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Prize for her outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada.