The Inuvialuk artist’s oeuvre—complete with Furbies, soapstone tampons and satirical selfie backgrounds—has garnered plenty of attention, a bit of outrage and even a Sobey Art Award
(Photography by Allison Seto)
Artists run wild in Kablusiak’s family, on both sides. Their childhood homes in Yellowknife, and later Edmonton, were filled with relatives’ creations, including a painting of wild geese—a wedding present to their parents from Kablusiak’s uncle, Bill Nasogaluak, a famed Inuvialuk artist. “I didn’t get it then,” says Kablusiak, who busied their own tiny hands with crafts. “Now I know Inuit art collectors would’ve been foaming at the mouth.”
With genes like that, it was practically a given that Kablusiak—who jokes that they only use their English name, Jade, at Starbucks—would eventually move to Calgary to pursue an arts diploma and degree. But as a drawing major, Kablusiak says, being confined to a page quickly began to feel like “holding in a sneeze.” So they pushed the envelope—first in new mediums, then in taboo subject areas. Kablusiak’s breakthrough moment was a 2017 exhibition at Calgary’s Sled Island Music and Arts Festival, featuring soapstone carvings of tampons, cigarettes and a Diva Cup for good measure.
By 2018, Kablusiak had found representation with Calgary gallery Norberg Hall and, in 2021, co-curated the inaugural collection at Qaumajuq, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s new Inuit art centre. They garnered buzz for their mould-breaking mash-ups of Inuit art history and Western pop culture, zeroing in on the painful displacement of, they say, “being from the North, but existing down south.”
There were smaller creations, like a spin on Ookpik, an owl figurine first popularized in the ’60s by Inuit artist Jeannie Snowball. (Kablusiak’s Ookpiks were Garfields and Furbies.) They also branched out into more sweeping, sombre installations. In 2021’s “Suviittuq!” or “Can’t be helped/Too bad!” an image of a Tuktoyaktuk cemetery hung on a wall, a background for visitors’ selfies. It poked at what Kablusiak calls the “pain spectacle” of news coverage of unearthed unmarked graves. “If I dress these things up with humour,” they say, “it’s like taking honey with a pill.” And the controversy that follows? “I get off on that.”
A photo of “TY Mr. Sobey,” one of Kablusiak’s installations at the Sobey Art Award Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta. (Photo by Leroy Schulz)
Last November, just after their 30th birthday, Kablusiak won the prestigious Sobey Art Award—the first Inuvialuk artist to do so. They plan to put the $100,000 prize toward a home in northern Alberta, one with enough room for a studio. Anyone worried about Kablusiak selling out need only lay eyes on “TY Again, Mr. Sobey,” a soapstone statue of a figure pleading on bended knee—and surrounded by dollar signs—now on display at the National Gallery in Ottawa. It elicited a big reaction from grocery heir Rob Sobey. “He was moved, but also laughing,” Kablusiak says. “I didn’t expect that.”
POP QUIZ
Secret obsession: Stickers. “I became a member of the Sandylion Sticker Club at 16. Now, I only let myself have a couple of sheets.” Working on: Canvas-and-cowhide parka covers Wall art: “I have a couple of framed works from Inuk artists, like Darcie Bernhardt and Shuvinai Ashoona—some gifted, some bought” Winter activity: Staying inside, mostly McDonald’s order: “I’ve had it less since I discovered my gluten intolerance, but the fries are gluten-free!” Ink well: Kablusiak’s tattoos include a tablurun, a traditional Inuit facial tattoo, as well as several DIY hand-poked creations
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
