Blue Cloud

The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is proud to present Blue Cloud, an exhibition featuring Cape Dorset artist Ohotaq Mikkigak (1936-) with Toronto painter Jack Bush (1909-1977). Conceived by Toronto-based independent curator Nancy Campbell, Blue Cloud is the third in her series of critically acclaimed exhibitions that challenge the conception of a linear Canadian art history by bringing together Inuit artists with their Southern counterparts.

Blue Cloud presents a selection of large and small landscape drawings by Ohotaq Mikkigak alongside several early paintings by Jack Bush, an artist whose work is understood as synonymous with international modernist abstraction. The exhibition’s unconventional pairing observes provocative formal similarities between both artists’ works.

Like Ohotaq Mikkigak, Bush’s oeuvre changed significantly late in his life. Both artists are master colourists, making radical, poetic pictures with streaks of colour. Both discovered imagery in the things immediately around them; and both radically abstract from nature. The selection of works in this exhibition highlights both artists’ unique interpretation of their surroundings, and in the shared qualities of their work, makes the case for a more integrated understanding of contemporary Canadian art.

Blue Cloud is the third of Toronto curator Nancy Campbell’s trilogy of exhibitions. It is preceded by the award-winning Noise Ghost (2009), which featured the work of Shuvinai Ashoona with the drawings and installations of Toronto artist Shary Boyle, and Scream (2010), which highlighted the sculpture of Samonie Toonoo with the drawings of Toronto artist Ed Pien. An illustrated catalogue will be produced in association with this project (2012).